Agena Bioscience · Bioscience
DNA Mass Array Assay Management
At Agena Bioscience I led design for a DNA Mass Array Analyzer application monitoring KPIs for both instrument and operator, with real-time notifications and structured error handling.
- Role
- Senior Head UI/UX Designer & Strategist
- Timeline
- End-to-end program
- Team
- Operators, hardware engineers, regulatory, product
The problem
The instrument generated far more signal than the operator could act on. Without a hierarchy, everything read as equally urgent, which means nothing does.
Emerging technology meant almost no precedent to borrow from; the interaction model had to be invented and then validated with real operators.
- , FDA and ISO compliance across every state and message
- , Sensitive hardware whose failure modes drive the UI
- , Few precedents in an emerging category
- , Design work directly tied to an investor milestone
Process
01
KPI hierarchy
Separated instrument health from run health from operator action, so each dashboard answers one question instead of showing everything.
02
Error handling as a designed system
Every error state mapped to a cause, a consequence and a next action, required for compliance, and what operators actually needed.
03
Prototype with operators
End-to-end prototyping and validation directly with the people running assays, iterating against their real sequence of work.
04
Compliance-ready documentation
Design artifacts produced in a form regulatory review could consume without translation.
Screens
Every screen and design artifact from this engagement.
Outcome
- Funding
- application became a key asset in the raise
- FDA / ISO
- aligned interaction and error model
- 3 dashboards
- health, run, setup
What I'd do differently
I would have built the error taxonomy before the dashboards. We designed the happy path first and then retrofitted failure, the reverse order would have been faster.
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