Team:Wellesley Desyne/Methodology

Methodology

OVERVIEW

As a human computer interaction lab, we applied a user-centered design (UCD) approach throughout all our projects, whether they were web-based, MS surface, or z-space applications. What distinguishes UCD from other approaches is user input throughout all stages of the design process. Through user studies, we obtain valuable information about users’ behaviors and practices that allow us to create software that is more intuitive and useful. User input allow us to enhance the users’ intuitions instead of forcing them to adapt their behavior to our software. Each iteration of our design involves consultation with the opinions of our users - in this case, synthetic biologists - to better address concerns and issues with our software.

DESIGN PROCESS

The user-centered design process we followed this year can be divided into four different steps: analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation. Following, we describe the key activities we employed in each stage.

Analysis

In this phase of our project, we observed groups of users who could potentially use our software. Making sure our software was effective and practical involved us getting to know users’ needs and what features they would like to see based on their current methodologies. Our analysis aimed to envision scenarios in which our software would be useful for our potential users and to create a test scenario after a basic version of our product was complete.

Observed users:

• MIT iGEM team
• BU iGEM team
• Introductory science students from Wellesley College who were mostly biologists and neuroscientists
• MIT-Wellesley Upward Bound Program high school participants.

We consulted with Natalie Kuldell, founder of BioBuilder, to understand the lab practices of synthetic biologists. Our team also participated in a first-hand experience in which we got to perform an experiment to better familiarize ourselves with wet-lab environment and techniques. We especially took note of the gestures we were using throughout the experiment. The experience was also valuable to understand biological safety protocol.
Before designing our applications, we looking at existing applications for the MS Surface and online applications that visualized programming languages and organized queries in unique ways. These applications included MoClo Planner, Scratch, and Blockly, among others. While working on zMol we looked at various representations of the periodic table in 3D and chose one that seemed most interesting and practical with the zSpace. With zTree we looked through some photos of other 3D Tree structures and chose one that seemed appealing, usable, and interactive with the zSpace.

Design

The next step in our user-centered design process was the Design phase, where we created low-fidelity prototypes of the software we envisioned developing while collaborating with our users. We brainstormed ideas together, and went through several iterations of prototypes before we started developing and testing a high-fidelity prototype of our software. During the first few weeks of our summer research, we had a lengthy brainstorming discussion with collaborators from BU and Agilent Technologies. We presented our ideas for Eugene software, our outreach program and the z-space software. Afterwards, users pointed out the practicality of our designs and where we could improve. After incorporating their feedback into our design, we then created a low-fidelity paper prototype for Eugenie which stepped through each step of our software. For our web application, Bac to the Future, we created a mockup which served a similar purpose.

During the design phase, we tested the usability of our software. Our first user studies for Eugenie occurred with introductory science students from Wellesley College. The Bac to the Future team was also able to iterate on their design with middle school students from MIT-Wellesley’s Upward Bound program.

Implementation

After conducting our user studies, we then started the implementation stage of our design process, which includes additional user studies with synthetic biologists and refining our software past the basic functionality to improve design and efficiency. During this phase, we conducted additional user studies with BU and MIT’s iGEM teams. We iterated on the visual design of Eugenie as well as adding small improvements which increased the usability of our software.

Evaluation

Finally, in the evaluation stage we deployed our refined software tools for use in the wet-lab and evaluated overall user satisfaction regarding the software tools created.

Usability and usefulness: we conducted testing with the BU and MIT teams as well as with Wellesley biology students. We used various quantitative measures (e.g. time on task, subjective satisfaction) and qualitative indicators (e.g. user collaboration and problem solving styles). See results from the evaluation of Eugenie, Bac to the Future, and zTree.