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Team:Wellesley Desyne/Human Practices
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Revision as of 20:20, 23 September 2013
Wellesley HCI iGEM 2013
User Research
OVERVIEW
This summer, the Wellesley College iGem team worked with many potential users of our projects to create tools that improved synthetic biology education or improved efficiency and collaboration in the context of synthetic biology research. We spoke to many potential users, from researchers heading labs in synthetic biology research to users in industry and college students studying biological sciences. We conducted user studies of our programs with volunteer subjects from the MIT and BU iGEM teams as well as students from Wellesley College who had a range of knowledge and exposure to synthetic biology. Receiving feedback from both target and non-target users during the design process is a vital part of the project design process, especially since we are focused on a user-centered design (UCD) process. We valued all input from the people we collaborated or interacted with during user testing.
BASIC WET-LAB TRAINING WITH NATALIE KULDELL AT MIT
Working in the wet lab
At the beginning of the summer, the Wellesley Desyne team received an introduction to synthetic biology and wet-lab training by Professor Natalie Kuldell at MIT. After reviewing the core concepts of synthetic biology, we also discussed in detail the safety concerns of working in this multi-disciplinary field. During the wet-lab training, we were able to participate first hand on well-known and highly regarded experiments such as E.chromi. Through this experience, our team realized that several factors could strongly affect the success or failure of a synthetic biology experiment: labeling equipment properly, meticulously following clearly written instructions, and communicating with other team members. In addition, we discovered that there are many technical difficulties of working in a laboratory environment, especially for those who are nonscientists. Most importantly, there are many safety concerns that are not understood or well known to the public because of synthetic biology’s recent emergence as a leading field. Thus, we realized the importance of educating the public, especially the next generation of synthetic biologists, on the safety concerns of working in a wet-lab environment, and put those considerations into many of our projects.
BRAINSTORMING AND COLLABORATION WITH BU
BU Brainstorm session
We continued our tradition of collaborating with the BU iGem team. We had a major brainstorming session with BU at the beginning of the summer where the teams introduced their projects to each other. We received basic feedback and brainstormed for initial goals for our three projects: Eugenie, zMol_zTree, and Bac To The Future. Eugenie in particular benefitted immensely from the initial brainstorming because we needed to learn more about the programming language, Eugene, that was developed to aid synthetic biologists in designing novel genetic circuits. Once we spent time developing several solid ideas for each of our three projects, we invited the BU iGem team to Wellesley to present our ideas to them and get feedback so we could decide which versions of the projects to pursue further. Throughout the summer, we kept up communication with the BU iGem team for information and feedback during project development. As part of our UCD process, we tested developed software with members of the team, and their feedback and responses helped to shape further development of our projects in the direction that we wanted to take them.
SITTING IN ON BU LAB MEETINGS
A few times this summer, members of the Eugenie project sat in on BU iGem lab meetings to observe how members of their research group collaborated while developing novel genetic circuits for their summer research projects. The meetings were informative and helpful in guiding us in the development of software tools that would assist in the novel genetic circuit design process. From observing these meetings, we considered how our programs could help foster collaboration and wet lab research work. Some of the things we thought about included how work could be shared and edited between students and PIs, and how our programs would fit in with other tools that were currently used.
GETTING SOME INITIAL FEEDBACK FROM WELLESLEY COLLEGE STUDENTS
Eugenie user testing results
As part of our desire to get feedback about the design and useability of our programs from students that had a range of exposure to synthetic biology, we tested our programs initially on our fellow Wellesley College students. Observing our users as they used our programs to accomplish assigned tasks helped us refine our programs so that the software tools we had created were not themselves hurdles for users working in synthetic biology research. We also collected both verbal and written feedback, as well as videotaped the user studies for later analysis.
NEXT STEPS TO TAKE IN THE UCD PROCESS
While we made progress in great leaps and bounds this summer, we are aware that there is still work to be done to continue to develop our projects past the scope of iGem. We hope to continue receiving user feedback from other members of the Wellesley College community, BU iGem, and MIT iGem. The Eugenie team will need to do more user testing to make sure that our program is robust enough that synthetic biologists can use it to design any genetic circuit they can think of. zMol_zTree's goals are? Bac To The Future's goals are also to perform more user testing and create a gesture-based, interactive tool, to iterate and improve the usability of the application as well as to maximize the potential for education.
