NCBI Submission Portal — Emily Lawrence

TOOLS: SKETCH, MARVEL

THE CLIENT

Client: NIH/National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Customer Experience Strategy and Support

Role: UX Designer/Researcher

Date: September 2018 to present.

Within a team, I was tasked to develop User Research, create User Stories, develop and implement a User Centered Design strategy for NCBI’s heavily used Submission Portal under a mandate to improve customer/user experience for scientists, doctors and researchers. agencyQ redesigned and implemented user-centered design processes and technology, working within NIH’s agile methodology in collaboration with NCBI using design sprints, extensive rapid prototyping, persona development, journey mapping with continuous testing and improvements.

THE CHALLENGE

User Research and User Story Collaboration, User-Centered Design: The Submission Portal is a functionally complex and widely used tool for the submission of large, complex DNA datasets. Its main purpose is for researchers and scientists to efficiently get the Accession number required for published work. The existing user experience/workflow was cumbersome without an intuitive navigation.

THE RESEARCH

To reimagine the user experience, it was paramount to determine the goals, needs and behaviors of the main stakeholders and develop several personas to inform our user stories and UX/UI and design elements of the new Portal experience. We conducted user research and analyzed existing research data, including surveys and user interviews. We recruited experts from all functional and user areas of NIH/NCBI, and engaged them during a series of strategic design sprints to develop an initial working prototype of the redesigned Portal. For each sprint, agencyQ worked with the NCBI product owner to establish sprint goals and priorities. We regularly met for retrospectives to ensure our teams are working collaboratively to the unified goal. The Agile / Design Team consisted of NIH Program Managers, Developers and Subject Matter Experts (scientists, researchers, program leaders). Stakeholders included NCBI Executives, Program Managers, SMEs and other internal and external users of NCBI content.

The objective of the Design Sprints was to get consensus on the definition of the users, sorting six individual existing and new personas into broader archetypes, which would enable us to efficiently design workflows that aligned with the personas’ common needs. Sprints were conducted on neutral ground to encourage collaboration, give everyone an equal voice, and eliminate the bias and bureaucracy that hinder the process and muddy the users’ point of view. We focused on Journey Mapping, ask-the-expert, target defining, and basic sketching activities which resulted in a consensus project goal: “To create a simple, understandable, approachable submissions experience to guide users, no matter the expertise, through the submissions process.” Using the MOSCOW (Must-Should-Could-Wish) methodology, we prioritized the broad range of proposals to create a strategic roadmap for product creation and launch to align with high-volume submission timelines during the academic calendar year.

User Research from the Sprints was used to develop Persona Archetypes, a System Schema to analyze how users currently engaged with the system, and Journey Maps. Personas represent unique individuals within a user base produced after heavy empirical research, including interviews and surveys. Archetypes are built as composites of overlapping Personas to indicate a typical example of a person or activity. The Persona Archetypes were based on existing research and our own deep dive into reviews of internal surveys, interviews, and market research to identify three larger Archetypes: New, Expert, and Power. We opted to deliver a hybrid Persona-Archetype that gives personalized (Persona), but typical (Archetype), snapshots of a group of Submission Portal users. Knowing that nearly everyone across NCBI will interact with the Portal, these Archetypes were designed to accommodate future NCBI users from other projects, teams, and initiatives. By design, there is overlap between the Personas where they may be Expert in one area of the process, but a Novice in another—the Archetypes should be flexible enough to absorb many kinds of specific Personas.

The System Schema offered a succinct visualization of all the ways that a user can access the system, as described by participants in the design sprints, user interviews, and our internal heuristic audit. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that helps users create pathways so there is less cognitive load to do tasks; a heuristic audit is a review of a product to make sure that it achieves these goals. We use the NNG (Nielsen Norman Group) framework.

The Journey Maps built upon this research to show how each Archetype interacted with—or opted out of—the process. We layered these Journeys to explicitly show where the different types of users intersected, and diverged, to identify immediate opportunities for improvement in the submission process and inform the User Stories we developed for each Persona and Archetype Journey and User Experience.

The old process included a manual audit that slowed publication, which we improved through analysis of years of raw user data to develop a User-Centered Design focused customer experience. We used Plain Language principles to repurpose content for quicker FAQs and designed a self-service section so users could bypass customer service. (Plain Language Content Writing was a priority as we worked with NCBI SMEs to translate complex scientific jargon into easily searchable and identifiable content). We made Search more prominent to get answers quickly and designed the system to be mobile responsive.

We created a working prototype of virtually the entire system in UXPin, a tool to create wireframes through high-fidelity clickable website-like experiences. It writes basic CSS to handover to developers to start with, and packages all of the assets in an easy to share link. External users can review and comment, and iterations can be built within one project to preserve history while moving forward with development.

Our UX/UI strategy and technology team completed several additional sprints working with NCBI’s development team to build and launch the new Submission Portal. The final product incorporates modern USWDS standards for creating new government websites while maintaining the guidelines in NCBI’s Web Design Standards, aimed at developers for reusable code snippets. New styles and layouts were reviewed for 508 compliance before development. The system was built on Django and Python on the backend, and Javascript/HTML/CSS for the frontend. Selenium was used to verify functionality and visual integrity, as well as 508-compliance. For tracking user and project metrics, agencyQ designed an analytics dashboard to report the performance of multiple NIH business-unit websites using Tableau. The dashboard provides high-priority metrics in an easily accessible format for stakeholder across NIH teams

THE OUTCOME

The new system has greatly improved users’ ability to quickly upload and publish important research, driven greater engagement and improved user experience among NCBI’s diverse audiences.

The live site can be viewed at https://submit.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ on either desktop or mobile.