How to strike a balance between usability and functionality

Over 21 % of the world’s population uses the Apple iPhone, evidence that the company has found the ideal recipe for transforming a luxury piece of technology into an everyday essential.

Though its functionality is incredibly complex, the iPhone is chosen by consumers across various educational backgrounds and age groups due to its reliability, user-friendly interface, and sleek design.

While it is fundamentally a smartphone, the iPhone caters to each user's unique needs with minimal customization.

This adaptability makes the iPhone a useful analogy for the role of automation technology in ambitious labs. The iPhone's customizability is key to its widespread use, yet the advocacy for lab automation lags far behind the iPhone's universal adoption.

Unlike smartphones, functional lab automation systems do not need to be aesthetically appealing. However, they do need to be adaptable, helpful, and easy to use.

This article explores the importance of balancing familiarity with customization to integrate automation into the everyday workflow of labs.

Reducing cognitive load for scientists

A growing skills gap sees the scientific sector struggling to recruit scientists, particularly those with automation experience. There is also a significant cognitive load barrier when using specific automation platforms: users are quite simply overwhelmed.

Source: buildfire.com

Buildfire.com states that an average user downloads between 60 and 80 apps to their phone, using approximately nine apps per day and up to 30 each month.

The use of nine apps per day means that users have potentially learned to operate nine different interfaces. Assuming this figure is doubled to include programs like ELNs, data studios, and schedulers used in lab life, a typical lab-based scientist could be using up to 20 independent pieces of software daily.

Poor usability in technology is not only time-consuming and monotonous for the end user, but it also presents a significant barrier to productivity and discovery in the lab.

In his Ph.D. thesis titled “Students’ learning experience in the chemistry laboratory and their views of science,” Hendra Agustian from the University of Copenhagen argued that improper cognitive load management can impede deep learning, particularly for novice scientists. This is particularly prominent when users experience too much unimportant ‘noise.’

The figure below outlines how being subjected to unessential information, such as learning to use excessively complicated automation software, can adversely affect a scientist’s capacity to learn lab fundamentals successfully.

Source: Agustian, Hendra. 2020/02/21

Considering the number of instruments in regular use in a lab and the typically steep on-the-job learning curve for staff, a lack of enthusiasm for complicated automation technology is understandable.

Simple design for improving confidence 

The LINQ automation platform has been designed and engineered to minimize lab users' cognitive load from both a hardware and software perspective.

The platform allows users to view every moving component on the bench, with lighting hints highlighting the connection between the bench and the LINQ Cloud operating software.

Image Credit: Automata

Making automation software user-friendly

It is frequently the digital components of lab automation that lack user-focused design.

LINQ Cloud’s user interface features a canvas-style workflow designer that offers a whiteboarding experience. This allows users, regardless of their automation experience, to confidently 'sketch out' their experiments, incorporating parameters, conditionals, and more.

Video Credit: Automata 

Building a workflow with LINQ Cloud

LINQ Cloud features an array of innovative and user-friendly features, including tabbed navigation and simple color profiling cues designed to inspire recognition, build familiarity, improve confidence, and encourage enthusiasm from users.

It is also important to note that LINQ Cloud can be used without coding skills, though the platform accepts input via Python if users are familiar with it.

The platform also features user-based permissions, meaning its day-to-day operators will not be overwhelmed with administration tools. At the same time, administrators are not distracted by the customization tools available to power users.

Customization as required

While minimizing customization is often the quickest way to remove usability barriers, relying solely on 100 % no-code software isn't the best approach for future-proofing lab automation solutions.

A great deal of lab automation software is too customizable, meaning that standardization, traceability, and repeatability are particularly challenging, or it is so inflexible that it is unsuitable for use in many scenarios.

Programming allows users to automate many time-intensive tasks, such as data sorting, documentation, and the rapid updating of models and results. It is also key to facilitating collaboration and sharing protocols via global platforms like protocols.io.

Customization and data accessibility features should never be altogether removed from automation software. LINQ Cloud is fully customizable via Python and has user permissions built-in as standard, meaning that it is suitable for both technical novices and experts.

Flexible experiment design, even with automation

Julie Huxley-Jones, Vice Present of Scientific, Digital and Tech at GSK, highlighted the importance of flexibility in her keynote speech at 2023’s Lab of the Future Europe conference:

“Each new concept that we test, experiment we do, piece of equipment we use, or modality that comes along allows us to challenge what we thought was possible beforehand; we cannot have an ecosystem where software doesn’t recognize these conjugates; we cannot have an ecosystem where hardware in our labs isn’t able to deliver the capability to test multifactorial medicines that we’re trying to discover and develop; we cannot be in a place where our physical constraints about what we can do in the lab hinder the human mind.”

LINQ has been designed to accommodate the needs of virtually any lab or experiment type. The platform is entirely physically and digitally agnostic, allowing almost every instrumentation to be integrated via LINQ Bench, and any data or tech stack to be accommodated by LINQ Cloud.

Flexible, multipurpose automation

LINQ Bench is a modular and vendor-agnostic tool that allows users to combine more robotic benches in any configuration as processes expand and requirements grow. Instruments can be added and moved as required, reagents and parameters can be easily changed, and equipment remains accessible for manual experimentation.

Flexible growth is possible with modular systems like LINQ. Image Credit: Automata

Modular systems like LINQ make flexible growth possible. The LINQ solution enables automation in lab spaces that are too small for traditional large systems, allowing even the smallest research and development facilities to conduct exciting experimentation at scale.

Image Credit: Automata

Risk-free creativity

LINQ Cloud’s user-friendly interface allows users, from complete novices to programmers, to design and simulate robust experiments, ensuring risk-free creativity throughout the lab.

Data from each facility, experiment, instrument, and user is standardized and transferred to the data lake upon execution. The data is also fully traceable in real time, meaning that anyone interested in exploring acquired results can access it from anywhere in the world.

Future-proofing investments

The importance of lab automation is undeniable, but many users worry whether significant investments in automation will remain viable in the long term.

The automation market is highly complex. If an automation solution is too intimidating, inflexible, or unreliable, potential users will continue to opt for the more manual option, even if this takes more time.

Working with a long-term automation partner like Automata is key to designing solutions that are fit for science and scientists. The company is staffed by ex-scientists and lab leaders who work closely with engineers and programmers to develop next-generation automation platforms like LINQ.

Video Credit: Automata 

Acknowledgments

Produced from materials originally authored by Automata Technologies Ltd.

About Automata

Born from a world-leading research lab, Automata is making total workflow automation accessible to labs frustrated by the limitations of their own environment.

Accelerating the innovation evolution

When two architects from Zaha Hadid’s research lab first approached robotics, their idea was to explore applications specific to architectural engineering.

But they soon discovered that modern automation wasn’t just unnecessarily complex – it was actively restricting innovation. And not just within their industry – within many others too. It was clear that robotic automation was a field where their combined experience in computational research and design could make a real difference. Assembling a team of industry experts, Automata was founded, with a clear aim: to enable new opportunities for innovation with automation.

A clearer path to progress

Automata’s focus narrowed on an industry where they felt their expertise could have the most impact – life sciences, and particularly within biolab environments.

Since then, the team has been working closely with leading pathology labs to pioneer protocols that enable labs to scale with precision

Automata Labs is the product of that philosophy – simplifying lab environments and empowering the people working tirelessly in the pursuit of progress.

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