Our community develops and delivers numerous best practice guides, blogs, and toolkits to increase the adoption of user experience (UX) practices in life sciences.
Since our inception in 2017, our community has created the following deliverables:
- Understanding UX Skill Sets – a framework to help non-UX literate managers, peers, and recruiters to understand the skills, activities they might need to look for when building their teams.
- Data and UX heuristics – a set of heuristics to help guide design practices when working with data-driven projects.
- A UX for Life Sciences Toolkit to enable businesses to adopt UX principles and methods as they develop scientific software.
- UXLS Procurement Guidelines – to help teams identify off-the-shelf products or solutions which may provide better usability and meet your users’ needs.
- UXLS Maturity Model – a model to evaluate the maturity of UX in your organisation, project or team.
We continue to work on other projects such as a UX maturity model for the life sciences which will speed up the adoption of UX in the life sciences.
Why is this important?
As we scale UX in our organizations, how UX is performed needs to be operationalized to increase efficiencies. Our aim is to share materials and knowledge on research such as User Consent Forms and Protocols.
Other key issues we aim to address through the resources we develop and the education series we run include:
- Remote research knowledge sharing
- How to disseminate research findings and insights across organizations
- Data Visualization as an essential skill for UX designers to have in their toolkit
- UX exploration of new interactions within the lab environment – we plan to align with our Lab of the Future project to provide a UX lens on the practicalities of using new technologies
- Change agents in corporations and how we can democratize our UX process to the wider organization.
- Providing graduates with a safe space to learn and share topics of interest through our Graduate UXLS stream
What will the project achieve?
This project aims to enable UX in the R&D life sciences through engagement with a wider audience including stakeholders such as senior management. Our vision is to communicate the value added by UX at all levels of our organisations.
How will the project do this?
The project has built a toolkit which focus’s on issues faced in developing digital products specifically for R&D in the life science and healthcare environments. The UXLS toolkit includes UX techniques, methods and business-critical metrics.
Funders
Thanks to our funders who are making this project possible, without their help this community of UX experts would not exist or collaborate.
Publications
- Evolution of User Experience for Life Sciences by Jacek Ziemski (Roche), Simon Fortenbacher (GSK), James Hoeksma (AstraZeneca), Jan Taubert (KWS), Roger Attrill (Linguamatics), Paula de Matos (Pistoia Alliance), Andre Richter (Bayer) and Julie Morrison (RockStep Solutions) reproduced with kind permission from Drug Discovery World (DDW) Winter 2019/2020 Vol. 21 No 1
- UXLS-UX-design-value-of-software by Jenny Cham (EMBL-EBI, UK), Katrina Costa (EMBL-EBI, UK) reproduced with kind permission from Drug Discovery World (DDW) Summer 2017
