The goal of this project was to help Thermo Fisher’s users better navigate the complex software that operates their mass spectrometry equipment and bring their entire suite of services under one common UI on a new web-based platform. For this project I was joined by 5 other designers from agency, Rocket Communication, and about a dozen supporting team members from Thermo Fisher, including designers, researchers, developers and product managers.
After conducting extensive user and SME research that included hundreds of surveys and more than a dozen user interviews, we learned that users were spending much of their time troubleshooting errors in the old software and we having issues trying to manually schedule their experiments with their coworkers who had to share the same equipment. This resulted in a high maintenance cost for the Thermo support team, high frustration with Thermo’s customers, low user productivity, and ultimately lower sales for Thermo.
Our solution was to build in scheduling functionality into the software to help manage sharing equipment between users, as well as a completely updated UI based off of Thermo’s own web design system and style guide, and a more intuitive experience on a cloud-based platform to help cut-down on user error, while also making it easier for users to troubleshoot issues on their own.
The product is still being developed, but an early beta test revealed a significant increase in user productivity and numerous positive reviews from testers.
