Discovering

Understanding the Context and the User

First step, we had to know the research environment inside and out. We conducted interviews with 7 research assistants and students (Masters, PhD, Post-doc) as well as a couple professors from a variety of research backgrounds to learn the process of conduct physiological experiment. Our main focus was to learn the way they dealt with data, from collecting data to using it, and how they managed the entire process.

Finding the Patterns

Once the interviews were completed, we organized each interviewee’s jobs, pains, gains, and workflow into visual diagrams to help grasp the core concepts and themes. This format also helped the rest of the team easily and quickly understand the research environment and process.

Here are a couple insights we learned through user research:

It’s difficult to track participant’s performance outside of lab

Some experiments require long term monitoring at home. Due to a participant’s varying compliance level and technical savviness, often times the researchers ended up receiving data of poor quality or not receiving any data at all. The biggest downside was the time and resources expended; often times the researcher would only find out after the devices were returned.

No standardized data sharing procedure

Although much time and resources are spent in collecting this valuable data, most of the time the data is only used once — by the researcher who originally collected the data. The main issue here is the lack of a standardized and organized sharing procedure, which make it difficult for the members of the same lab to find and use previously collected data.

Creating Persona

Based on the outcome of the user research and the company’s business strategy, we targeted the group of “Low resources and inexperienced” researchers because we felt this group could benefit the most through the use of our service. Once we decided on the primary group, we synthesized our user research outcomes to develop a persona: Dexter the recently-graduated researcher.

Brainstorming

We conducted a 2-day brainstorm sprint comprised of engineers, marketers, business strategists, in addition to designers with a clear goal: to simplify and optimize the data collection process, allowing Researchers to spend less time on data collection and more time on data analysis.

Our diverse team came up with many incredible ideas. I’ve included some of these here.

Rental business model

Business strategists, hearing how the billing cycle and grant funding process worked, created a rental business model, lowering the initial cost of on-boarding for labs, making it easier to get the budget passed by grant foundations.

Participant Linkedln

On hearing that many student researchers relied heavily on social media groups to find participants, our marketing/social media team proposed a “participant LinkedIn” which allows the researchers to easily find the suitable and high compliance participants.

Security and Privacy is key

The representative from the Legal side, along with our user-privacy advocate, discussed how to create a strong sense of security, on-top of the built in security functions. In conclusion, we decided not to include any user identifiable information of participants, making the sign-up process transparent and completely anonymous for subjects.

The workshop was very successful as we gained lots of creative insights. More importantly, we got everyone involved in the design process.

Concept Developing

Armed with the insights from our brainstorming, we came up with a service concept:

A platform that enables  researchers to remotely collect physiological data from participants and easily manage participant compliance at the same time.

The goal is to help researcher collect high-quality data more efficiently than ever before. With PhysioQ LabFront, researchers are no longer limited by the physical restrictions of the lab — allowing both researchers and participants to operate from the comfort of their homes. This has the added bonus of facilitating the collection of "real-world data".

Concept Testing

We invited 3 researchers to our concept testing workshop. All of them have conducted physiological experiments with portable devices before. The goal of this workshop was to know if the users could understand the service concept, as well as singling out the most important features.

The process of the workshop was as follows:

Session 1: Introduce the overall service outline to the users, trying to gauge their understanding of it.

Session 2: Explore the user's interests towards each feature.

Session 3: Present the interactive prototype to the users to get their feedback.

Getting Feedback

We got lots of valuable insights and feedback from the workshop. The users were very excited about our service since they could see LabFront helping them increase efficiency in conducting experiments. From the workshop, we discovered their understanding (or misunderstandings) of each feature, as well as how could we adjust the service to improve the user experience.

The followings are some of the feedback we got:

Data upload status needs to be clear

Researcher repeatedly told us about participants calling them to check if the data had been uploaded successfully, which is obviously very time-consuming. Therefore, clear data uploading/uploaded statuses should be included in the participant App to clarify this situation.

Tasks may require multiple monitoring devices

When it comes to physiological experiment, participants are often required to wear multiple monitoring devices for each task (ie: for a sleep analysis, they may require EEG, ECG, SpO2, etc.). Therefore we’d need to redesign the task creation (researcher view) and task view (participant view) information architecture to reflect to this change in mental model.

Include device tutorial in mission center could help a lot

Researchers are busy people. They want to reduce the time dealing with the participants as much as possible. One of the most common issues they had was to repeatedly teach the participants how to properly use the devices. Therefore, a clear tutorial in the mission hub could be a big help.

Things I Learned