The Pistoia Alliance Launches User Experience For Life Sciences Toolkit

By Bio-IT World Staff

February 13, 2018 | The Pistoia Alliance has today announced the launch of the User Experience (UX) for Life Sciences (LS) Toolkit, to help life science companies improve UX in line with other global industries. The UXLS toolkit marks the culmination of a collaborative project involving more than 50 UX specialists from 20 different organizations across the world; including several top ten pharmaceutical companies, bioscience, and technology firms. The toolkit contains UX case studies, methods, and metrics - enabling life science companies to design better, more intuitive, more usable digital products, specifically for R&D in the life science and healthcare environment.

“In today’s world, software is the gateway to unlocking the many zettabytes of data that humans produce. When scientific software is poorly designed, it is frustrating and time-consuming to use, and adds yet another barrier to the acceptance and adoption of new digital technologies, such as automation and Artificial Intelligence. This has the cumulative effect of making drug discovery and development far less efficient and productive,” commented Steve Arlington, President of The Pistoia Alliance, in a press release. “As we become more familiar in our personal lives with digital technologies that interact intuitively and respond to our needs, the desire for technology that ‘just works’ in our professional lives is also growing. The potential for good UX design to impact life science R&D is significant - from improving the UX of clinical trials and making it easier for patients to participate, to delivering cutting-edge UX design that supports the ‘laboratory of the future’. UX design should not be considered a remote or niche area, and we hope that our UXLS toolkit enables more companies to realize this potential.”

The UXLS project was formed by The Pistoia Alliance in recognition of the fact that many life science organizations are behind the curve when it comes to UX. Although UX principles are widely recognized and have been applied successfully in other industries, such as retail and financial services, adoption and use in life science is low. Members of The Pistoia Alliance communicated this issue, and the UXLS project began as a result in early 2017. The project empowers life science professionals to realize the benefits that UX design can deliver through engagement with a wider audience, including stakeholders in senior management. The global UXLS project team worked collaboratively to develop the toolkit which provides a “how-to” that helps businesses adopt UX principles and methods as they develop scientific software.

The UXLS toolkit so far contains six case studies from organizations such as Novartis, EMBL-EBI, and AstraZeneca; 10 published methods, such as interactive prototyping and usability testing; meaningful principles that will assist and explain activities to better a system or process. The toolkit will be beneficial for UX practitioners, bioinformaticians, software developers, and technical and IT managers.