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The Broad Institute

Work completed as an employee of PixelMEDIA

This world renowned biotech research lab needed to design a proprietary order tracking system for tissue samples. It turns out we also needed help understanding their own workflow. 

View Prototype 1   ·   View Prototype 2

The Problem

The Broad was commonly contracting for software designed for their unique needs. Working with some managers from the Broad's technology group, my team workshopped our way through basic requirements and user flow. One might imagine something as simple as tracking the status of lab processing to be straightforward. But it was not. 

The Project

I was assigned to a team and charged with creating a functioning low-fidelity prototype. It quickly became clear that we lacked insight into the needs of the end users, technicians working in labs. The project scope didn't allow for interviews with these users, so it was impossible to know what their goals and pain points were.  Perhaps the most crucial data we needed to create the best tool possible was missing. 

With the help of a teammate, we reverse engineered use cases from research available from other projects completed recently for the Broad. Our personas were vague, so we leaned on best practices as surrogates for missing data. Based on similar projects, we knew that users would want a universally accepted, foolproof visual marker for each order. We used a kanban-inspired set of indicators to show the status of lab processing and developed and produced it in an HTML prototype. 

The Payoff

We had one chance to test the product with live users, so we needed to have a well-reasoned prototype for them to respond to. Our resourcefulness in finding a surrogate for the data paid off: the prototype worked for the lab techs, and they were able to deliver substantive feedback. We were able to revise our prototypes and deliver another round remotely to satisfy the client's brief.