Benchling
Founding Designer
How can modern-day technology and design accelerate the pace of R&D (research and development) to support complex biologics research?
Background
Pharma and biotech are industries solving crucial problems in industries from medicine and energy, to food and agriculture, to materials and textiles. An essential component to success is access to data and information. Not only that, biotech and pharma require a foundation of verified data. Successful innovation is hampered by siloed information, leading to re-research, inconsistent data sets, and partially understood data-- in essence, data can become a liability.
I joined Benchling as the founding designer to help improve those data issues and complex processes through product-thinking and design. As the first product hire, I also had a unique opportunity to weave human-centered design into the company's processes.
Product goals
While the data our users worked with involved complicated workflows, we knew through research that those complications could be broken down, and that our job was to simplify for our users dated tools, workflows, and processes. We identified three primary goals: Easily input and configure data; Easily structure and query data; Centralize, standardize, and automate data
Design management goals
• Build design and research culture and collaborative environment
• Hire and manage marketing designer
The work
Samples from a series of presentations and workshops I gave on design
Building product design and culture from the ground up
Joining Benchling as the first designer, I aimed to build a research-driven design culture from the get-go, leading a series of talks and workshops to discuss human-centered design. I introduced research practices to the product development cycles, setting up a framework for engineers to observe, note-take, and even run sessions themselves.
Research was the most integral part of the design process for us, as our users' processes differed by company size and focus, and a level of domain knowledge in biotech was needed in order to make informed decisions. I prioritized building a strong collaboration culture when it came to design and research, whiteboarding often with engineers and working side-by-side to determine priorities.
Our work involved shipping complex documentation, editing, and workflow features, and we were oftentimes building tools that didn't yet exist. Through rapid development, research, and design cycles, our team produced iteratively, learning quickly from our mistakes and seeking always to improve.
A collection of integral, first-of-a-kind tooling to biotech that I led the design and implementation of
Samples of the wires, heatmaps, and redesign that I led
Impact and outcomes
1
Designer hired
2
Critical products updated with new competitive features
3
New, first-to-market products built and shipped
Built strong design culture
As the first designer at Benchling, I developed a culture of deep UX involvement from engineers, focused on side-by-side product development and research. My work extended from product to marketing, where I hired and managed a marketing designer, as well as led a marketing redesign that considered user experience from product to conference materials.
Built and shipped 5 major features and products
By the time I left Benchling, we had shipped a document and spreadsheet tool to help scientists complete parts of their workflows they couldn’t do in existing document programs; we had delivered on a Bioregistry, moving scientists from paper and spreadsheets to an integrated system in the Cloud; we had just shipped a Sample Management system to map their work in the lab to the digital space; and we were about to ship a Workflow Management system that synced complex systems of data across samples, docs, and sheets. The information and site architecture that I built is still being utilized today by biotech scientists around the world, and these products are now the core products for the biomedical platform at Benchling.