Product & Platform

Next-Generation Genomic Sequencing Analysis

The Seven Bridges Genomics Platform resolves the information bottleneck of genomics research by providing a central hub for teams to store, analyze, and jointly interpret their bioinformatic data. The NIH’s National Cancer Institute uses SBG to facilitate research and collaboration on petabyte-scale datasets like The Cancer Genomics Atlas (TCGA) in an environment that supports rapid discovery. Scientists use the Platform to collaborate on their research from anywhere in the world, bringing their questions to the data.

Clients/Partners: Seven Bridges
Roles: Product Design Lead
Industry: Product & Platform
Deliverables: Analytics , Competitive Analysis , Content Modeling , Information Architecture , Product Design , Release Planning , Wireframing
Recognition (Summary): Amazon Web Services, Bio-IT World Conference & Expo

Overview

01 / Problem: Seven Bridges built IGOR so biologists who can't code could run sequencing analysis in the cloud. Users signed up but didn't stay, and flat file storage fragmented their data.
02 / Design Challenge: Russ owned product design for the platform. He wrote the specs, set the roadmap and directed the team, with two months and a fixed backend.
03 / Approach: He cut sign-up to three fields and gave new users four entry points. The database couldn't hold relationships, so the interface did: inferred metadata, tags as pseudo-objects, visible cross-file links.
04 / Outcome: He set the metric before the work (new users completing a first task) and a baseline: 85 task starts, Jun–Dec 2012. No outcome data survives.

Process + Evidence Plates

- Fig 01 / Information Architecture
step1.png
step1.png
Decision: Fix data fragmentation through metadata, not storage
Result: Files stayed findable and connected without waiting on a new backend
- Fig 02 / Interaction Design
Onboarding 2: "Make the sign-up process feel effortless" — "If signing [up]…" Carries Russ's own byline block — Author: Russell S. Lebo / Modified: Sat Sep 08, p.13/27 | Page N/M. He built authorship, revision date and pagination into every spec page, which is why this archive can attribute design work precisely where most cannot. The dossier's claim that he is sole author of every design deliverable rests on exactly this. ⚠️ Date caveat: the OCR reads the modified date as "Sat Sep 08 2018", six years after this project. Both 8 September 2012 and 8 September 2018 fell on a Saturday, so the weekday cannot disambiguate — but every other artifact in the onboarding cluster is 2012, so this is almost certainly 2012 mis-read as 2018 (a 2/8 confusion). Do not cite a 2018 date from this file.
Onboarding 2: "Make the sign-up process feel effortless" — "If signing [up]…" Carries Russ's own byline block — Author: Russell S. Lebo / Modified: Sat Sep 08, p.13/27 | Page N/M. He built authorship, revision date and pagination into every spec page, which is why this archive can attribute design work precisely where most cannot. The dossier's claim that he is sole author of every design deliverable rests on exactly this. ⚠️ Date caveat: the OCR reads the modified date as "Sat Sep 08 2018", six years after this project. Both 8 September 2012 and 8 September 2018 fell on a Saturday, so the weekday cannot disambiguate — but every other artifact in the onboarding cluster is 2012, so this is almost certainly 2012 mis-read as 2018 (a 2/8 confusion). Do not cite a 2018 date from this file.
Decision: Cut registration to three fields
Result: Sign-up took seconds, and verification moved to a later, gentler prompt
- Fig 03 / User Flow Analysis
The post-registration welcome — "Welcome to IGOR, Milos! Your new account is now active." Addressed to a real colleague's first name. From Onboarding.graffle — the onboarding design. OmniGraffle master, exported page by page; the dossier records this archive's 112 process-documentation images as the highest count in the corpus, and these are them.
The post-registration welcome — "Welcome to IGOR, Milos! Your new account is now active." Addressed to a real colleague's first name. From Onboarding.graffle — the onboarding design. OmniGraffle master, exported page by page; the dossier records this archive's 112 process-documentation images as the highest count in the corpus, and these are them.
Decision: Greet new users with four low-commitment entry points
Result: New users found a first task quickly instead of facing an empty workspace
- Fig 04 / Interaction Design
Task Execution error states, specified eleven days before the main step spec — errors designed first, which is unusual and good. Carries Russ's own byline block — Author: Russell S. Lebo / Modified: Thu Jul 19 2012, p.10/13 | Page N/M. He built authorship, revision date and pagination into every spec page, which is why this archive can attribute design work precisely where most cannot. The dossier's claim that he is sole author of every design deliverable rests on exactly this.
Task Execution error states, specified eleven days before the main step spec — errors designed first, which is unusual and good. Carries Russ's own byline block — Author: Russell S. Lebo / Modified: Thu Jul 19 2012, p.10/13 | Page N/M. He built authorship, revision date and pagination into every spec page, which is why this archive can attribute design work precisely where most cannot. The dossier's claim that he is sole author of every design deliverable rests on exactly this.
Decision: Design task error and pending states before the happy path
Result: Failed and running computations explained themselves and offered a next step
- Fig 05 / Experience Design
IGOR reduced the barrier to entry by making known and verified workflows available for free.
IGOR reduced the barrier to entry by making known and verified workflows available for free.
Decision: Automate alignment, variant calling and annotation behind a graphical interface
Result: Biologists ran sophisticated analyses without writing code
- Fig 06 / Personas
A screenshot of the shipped product — step 3 as built. From the product shots/ and IGOR/ folders, which the dossier identifies as "the 'before' evidence": the pre-redesign state the design work was arguing against. Note the shipped navigation misspells "Pieplines" on several of these — a live typo, and the kind of detail a redesign brief is built from.
A screenshot of the shipped product — step 3 as built. From the product shots/ and IGOR/ folders, which the dossier identifies as "the 'before' evidence": the pre-redesign state the design work was arguing against. Note the shipped navigation misspells "Pieplines" on several of these — a live typo, and the kind of detail a redesign brief is built from.
Decision: Design for several research communities, not one generic scientist
Result: Rare-disease, cancer and evolutionary biologists each used IGOR to make discoveries in their own field