Ms Winnie Mok1, DR Nigel Ward1, DR Nick dos Remedios2, DR Kathryn Hall2, DR Steven Manos1
1Australian Biocommons, Melbourne, Australia, 2Atlas of Living Australia, Canberra, Australia
A key mission of Australian BioCommons is to deliver a diverse set of digital platforms and services that support our national life science research communities. When building systems and applications in response to such a mission, designers and engineers will often focus on project goals, attractive features, and technological capabilities, making assumptions about user requirements along the way.
This lack of focus on the user often leads to a shallow understanding of user personas (classes of users) and no understanding of their end-to-end user journey. As such it becomes impossible to know what end-user challenge we are actually solving. Therefore, we run the risk that our systems and applications become user-unfriendly, and we ultimately fail to meet expectations. A technology-first approach can also lead to a significant training burden as well as increased user support loads.
The Australian BioCommons has moved to solving user problems and aligning our deliverables with user expectations by adopting a Persona-based User Experience (UX) design journey. We have developed user personas for our platforms and services, which we have tested against user observations and interviews. We will showcase how we derived personas, how we validated and refined them, and how we used them in three project contexts: the (1) Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA), the (2) Assembly and Annotation workbench, and (3) Galaxy Australia. These personas are now being leveraged to design new life sciences platforms and services which are more inclusive, valuable, credible and, ultimately, more desirable to researchers.
Biography:
Winnie Mok is a User Experience (UX) Designer, User Interface (UI) Designer, Front-end developer, and an advertising Art Director. Her passion is to inspire and influence stakeholders and tech practitioners to adopt user-centred design approach and inclusive design thinking in their decision making process.