I still feel gratitude for this project, in which I learned first hand that a solution to a problem could end up being a million miles from what you expected at the start, and maybe not a single solution at all. At Ovation, one of the products I designed and marketed sought to help scientists discover the value in the data they created during the course of experimentation and analysis. Data often lacked essential metadata that helped other scientists figure out where data came from and make use of it. In addition, we wrestled with the idea of "data provenance", or recording the precise series of steps that resulted in the data in question. Initially it seemed highly technical. But I found through extensive conversations with scientists that in fact the problem wasn't technical at all, but essentially human. By providing better project management capabilities and collaboration features, as well as more human-centered approaches to tools like spread sheets, we designed a very compelling product, and finally uncovered the elusive scientific secrets.
Where did this data come from? That's was the primary question at the core of the problem space that Ovation for Researchers occupied. In the course of experimentation, scientists produced a multitude of data that they recorded. They would then use only a small bit of that data as an input in an analysis or their next experiment. The rest of that data would sit unused in a data warehouse somewhere. Did it have potential? Could someone else use it? Only if they knew the processes that produced it. From the very earliest prototypes we sought to map this out.
Much of the challenge initially came from finding a way for scientists to record information from sources (such as raw samples), experimental parameters and the inputs and outputs to them, and analysis protocols in a way that did create an extra burden. Here you see the result of a co-design process I shared in with a researcher at New York University. We developed the interface for chaining activities and results together while attempting to describe her research.
As I explored the problem more deeply through prototyping, I realized that very human problems like communication and project management frustrated them the most. As a designer, I prize meeting people where they are, solving problems there, and then expanding beyond that in both big and small ways. The final iteration of Ovation for Researchers I designed heavily emphasized an easy interface for managing lab members, documents, and commenting, which provided the basis for describing the scientific process and the data collected. We even created a more scientist-centric spreadsheet.