Project Overview

Galaxy Australia is an open source, web-based platform for accessible, reproducible and transparent computational research. It is powered by a global community of developers, designers, life scientists, academics and professionals.

Responsibilities

As UX lead, my role with Galaxy Australia was varied and involved user research, UI design, prototyping, and stakeholder engagement. Some examples of work were implementing Alphafold, a Google deepmind service for predicting protein folding on Galaxy Australia. I conducted user interviews to better understand the target user's needs, motivations and pain points with existing implementations of Alphafold. These interviews helped to inform requirements and UI/UX implementation of Alphafold on Galaxy.

Another exemplary work was conducting user journey mapping, UX surveying and persona mapping in order to establish a baseline of user segmentation for Galaxy Australia. I identified the problem that we didn't properly understand who our users were and would refer to them in vague terms such as new or power user. This UX research undertaking established baseline personas that could be applied in feature development cycles in order to correctly frame target users. Additionally, it uncovered many pain points, that were then prioritized and moved into the product roadmap.

Impact

Successfully implemented Alphafold on Galaxy Australia.
Redesigned the login and registration flow to include third party authentication.
Designed and implemented a new lab pages feature for Genome assembly and annotation.
Created personas, user journeys, and affinity mapping artifacts for a baseline user segmentation for Galaxy Australia.
Created and implemented a standardized UX survey for continuous data collection with user segments.
Galaxy Australia has completed 6 million computational jobs, and continues to grow in users and engagement.

Responsibilities

Working with the Global Galaxy team on Github to co-ordinate UX feature development
Conducting user interviews
Building and deploying UX surveys
Configuring Posthog to capture heatmaps of user behavior.
Conducting moderated usability testing for new features.
Conducting user journey and persona mapping, and affinity diagramming.
Low and High fidelity wireframing using Figma, prototyping and design library development.
Providing UX input to decision makers in relation to feature development and roadmapping.