Scaling UX capacity in a scientific organisation

About two years ago, I changed roles within the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). After three years as Lead User Experience (UX) Designer of the Open Targets Platform, I joined our Web Development and UX team.

My role in this team is to support the services at EMBL-EBI that do not have a dedicated UX Designer. Some of our larger services (such as UniProt, Europe PMC, Ensembl, Open Targets and the Human Cell Atlas) have an embedded UX Designer. But the remaining services rely on advice by me and my colleagues, Joseph Rossetto and Carla Oliveira (who joined our team in 2019 after the departure of Revathi Nathaniel).

Given that EMBL-EBI supports more than 100 tools and data resources, there is more demand for UX help than what three UX Designers can offer. So, together with my UX colleagues and in collaboration with the EMBL-EBI Training team, I started developing and delivering a one day hands-on UX training workshop to other colleagues at EMBL-EBI who were interested in UX but didn’t quite know how to start.

In this article I give a brief overview of this workshop and of the feedback that we received by our participants and leadership at EMBL-EBI.

Applying UX Design during the workshop

The aims of our UX training workshop are to:

• Introduce our colleagues to the fundamentals of UX design.
• Help them apply some popular UX methods with our guidance during the workshop.
• Encourage them to keep practicing UX design after the workshop.

During the workshop we explore the following topics:

• User research: How to interview and observe users to understand what they need and generate actionable insights.
• Design: How to come up with a range of solutions to address the needs that we have identified from user research.
• Testing: How to get feedback from users on our solutions and iteratively improve our design.

Through a series of hands-on activities, the participants articulate their assumptions about their target users, prepare a guide for a contextual interview, sketch various solutions for a design challenge and practice how to ask for feedback on a prototype.

I provide my trainees with examples of how we carried out these activities for the UX design of Open Targets (see Karamanis et al. 2018) in order to demonstrate how these methods can be applied to an end-to-end project. The workshop materials (see November 2019 version) also include videos which manifest best practices in user research and usability testing, highlights from relevant books and publications and links to the description of the methods that we practice and of related case studies from the User Experience for Life Sciences (UXLS) community.

The participants of our UX training workshop practice user research, sketching designs and asking users for feedback through a series of hands-on activities.

Applying UX Design after the workshop

This workshop is an opportunity for the participants to spend a day exploring the various aspects of UX Design so that they can familiarise themselves with the fundamental practices and continue to apply them afterwards.

Indeed many trainees go on to conduct more extensive user research, design activities and usability testing with their own teams after they have attended the workshop. My colleagues and I follow up with them and support them as they prepare and carry out these activities.

Developers, curators, trainers, data scientists and project leads from the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) explore ways to present annotations of protein structures. We helped one of our UX trainees to prepare and run this sketching session after he attended our UX training workshop.

Feedback by participants and leadership 

At the end of the workshop, the participants fill in a survey, which includes rating it on a scale ranging from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) and providing qualitative feedback. 59 out of the 69 people who participated in our 6 workshops so far filled in the survey. 56 out of 59 (i.e 9.5 out of 10) respondents rated the workshop with 5 or 4!

56 out of 59 (i.e 9.5 out of 10) respondents of the feedback survey rated our UX training workshop with 5 (excellent) or 4.

The qualitative feedback is equally encouraging, as exemplified by the following quotes:

• “Excellent - thank you so much, really enjoyed it and has given me a whole new motivation to get things changed (but by doing it the right way!) :o)”
• “Thank you again for an excellent course on Friday. I realised that it has changed my thinking for some things and is already being put into practice!”
• “Great session. I wanted to emphasise on the great balance that was given between practical and theory sessions.”
• “Very well organised and planned, good handouts, good time keeping and a good pace.”

The participants also indicate areas of improvement in their feedback so every workshop is slightly different (and ideally a bit better) than the previous one as we try to address the particular issues that the trainees raise with their comments.

Team leaders at EMBL-EBI have also responded positively to the provision of UX training and have been encouraging their staff to attend the workshop. Our director Ewan Birney wrote this delightful tweet in response to a post that I made about the user research that the workshop participants have been carrying out:

UX training is a team sport

In conclusion, our UX training workshops have allowed us to build a community of interest at EMBL-EBI and help our colleagues who were new to UX design learn its basic principles and apply them to their services.

Many thanks to the workshop participants for their enthusiasm and active involvement, which allowed us to scale the UX capacity at EMBL-EBI, and for their feedback, which helped us improve the workshop iteratively.

I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Web Development and UX team, in particular Joseph Rossetto (our Service Designer), Carla Oliveira (my fellow UX Designer), our former colleague Revathi Nathaniel, Andrew Hercules (the current UX Lead of Open Targets), Galabina Yordanova (the UX Lead of the Human Cell Atlas), Jonathan Hickford (the former Head of our team) and Peter Walter (our current Team Coordinator), as well as Xavier Watkins (Lead Web Developer at UniProt), Sarah Morgan (Scientific Training Coordinator), Melissa Burke (Scientific Training Officer) and the other members of the EMBL-EBI Training team who helped me plan and deliver this workshop over the last couple of years.

If you have been involved in scaling the UX capacity of your organisation by providing training or in any other way please let me know of your thoughts.

Related links

• Karamanis N. et al. (2018) Designing an intuitive web application for drug discovery scientists, Drug Discovery Today, Volume 23, Issue 6, Pages 1169-1174: This paper outlines how we designed the Open Targets platform. I provide my trainees with examples from this work to demonstrate how the methods that we practice on the workshop can be applied to an end-to-end project. 
• The User Experience for Life Sciences (UXLS) community includes descriptions of the methods that we practice in the UX training workshop and of related case studies. Join the UXLS group in LinkedIn for the latest announcements and to find out more about how you can make the most of UX for the Life Sciences.
• The workshop materials (November 2019 version) also include videos of best practice in user research and usability testing and highlights from relevant books and publications.