The Journey to STRUDEL: How We Came to Embrace User Experience in Scientific Ecosystems

Have you found building and delivering usable scientific software to be challenging? Encountering challenges meeting user needs?

Join us virtually for the first in the STRUDEL project’s series of events to help support adoption of user experience approaches in scientific software development.

Today, scientific software is ubiquitous and critical but often the experiences users encounter are an afterthought. All software requires ongoing usability and user experience (UX) improvements in order to be a reliable, sustainable community resource. Enabling these improvements requires the incorporation of user experience practices to systematically understand and design usable software interfaces and artifacts (whether graphical, command line, APIs, documentation, or beyond) to address user needs.

Join us for this hour long webinar traversing the Berkeley Lab Scientific Data Division UX team’s journey applying UX methods to scientific software. We will introduce the Scientific sofTware Research for User experience, Design, Engagement, and Learning (STRUDEL) project. STRUDEL is an open source science project advocating for and advancing the inclusion of User Experience (UX) practices and tools in scientific software development. This webinar dives into our team’s journey by revisiting the arc of our experiences supporting diverse research domains and types of software and examining how we define UX for scientific software. Attend to learn more about STRUDEL’s new Planning Framework and Design System that are crafted to help teams build more usable, scientific software. We will illustrate the need for a vibrant community of UX practice in scientific software development that motivated the creation of STRUDEL and our aim to foster an open science UX community. Please join us to learn more about opportunities to engage and help grow this community.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Lavanya Ramakrishnan is Senior Scientist and Division Deputy in the Scientific Data Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Deputy Project Director for the High Performance Data Facility (HPDF). Her research focuses on developing generalized methods and tools to manage workflows and data while working closely with scientific groups and influencing the design of next-generation high performance computing systems. Her current research explores the methods and infrastructure needed to support automation and self-driving labs. Ramakrishnan established and leads a scientific user research program focusing on studying and enumerating the way that scientists and communities use data and workflows to build usable tools for science.