Intuitive interface for life science assay automation

From life science lab instructions to automated assays in a few clicks

Making complex assay automation accessible to everyone

With the Assay Editor, Tecan wanted to enable more people, also on the customer side, to automate life science assays very easily. In this way, Tecan wants to ensure that there is no need to train programming experts, either on the customer side or at Tecan itself, and that all sides can continue to focus on their strengths.

To do this, it was necessary to adapt the technical complexity of automating an assay to the mental models of the users, most of whom have little or no programming knowledge. For this, an intuitive interface and excellent usability were particularly important.

Tecan Group Ltd.

Provider of automated laboratory solutions for clinical diagnostics and life sciences.

UX Research

UI Design

Software Engineering

The Assay Editor

The workflow works intuitively and simply by drag and drop. The elements shown in the editor correspond exactly to what is written in the process instructions for the assays. Lab staff simply assemble the desired assays from these elements. The finished assay with all steps is visually mapped on the screen. At the same time, the software translates the created process into an XML format in the background, just as the instruments need it.

Our UX process: Inspect and Adapt

In the Tecan Assay Editor project, we were able to make full use of our strengths in agile software development. Together with the Tecan team, which has strongly internalized the agile mindset, we helped establish clean processes and agile mindsets throughout the team and worked closely together in project management. This way, the team was always able to react very well to changes in requirements.

Project progress and outlook

The project started at the end of 2020 with a prototyping phase in which we gathered feedback from experts. Tecan is already using the Assay Editor internally. The next step is to enable Tecan's customers to independently create test automations with the Assay Editor.

Technologies

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Working with the Centigrade team has been an amazing experience. They've provided a wide range of expertise and sage advice in user research, concept design and visual design and finally worked with us to bring all this advice to fruition in a product we are extremely happy with! It has been especially refreshing to work with a group that truly invested the time to understand our complex and evolving problem domain, users and technical requirements.