UX Training and Planning

Learn the fundamentals to build good user experiences

STRUDEL offers open educational materials to strategize, design and evaluate high quality experiences for users. Developed with the research community’s needs in mind, our lessons, content, and tools can show you how to learn from and respond to scientific users’ needs when working with staffing constraints and a small budget.

Apply UX Research Methods

User experience can be evaluated in many ways. STRUDEL offers lessons and tools for some common methods.

Rapid Usability Testing

This Carpentries Incubator lesson teaches you to evaluate your tool's usability by observing users perform tasks. From participant recruitment to data analysis, this lesson has you covered.

Start Learning

Semi-Structured Interviews

This presentation teaches you how to learn from your users, giving practical techniques to gather rich data through interviews.

Heuristic Evaluation

Assessing your software—whether it is a CLI or GUI based tool—using design heuristics can surface key usability issues.

Strategize, Design, and Develop with STRUDEL

STRUDEL offers guidance on how to approach and execute your software project so that it is usable and able to grow over the long-term.

Ten Principles for Creating Usable Software for Science

Not sure where to begin with user experience work? In this paper, STRUDEL contributors explain why scientific software is unique and how to approach its usability.

Tips and Tricks for Using STRUDEL with AI assistants

If you want to speed up your app development using generative AI tools, explore our documentation on using STRUDEL with AI assistants. These tips are generalizable to any software development work with generative AI.

Implement Task Flows Expertly

Each STRUDEL Task Flow comes with advice on how to implement it in your context. Check each flow for the Guidelines for adapting the Task Flow to identify essential features to include.

Questions? Ideas? Looking to stay up to date?

Get in touch at

strudel at lbl dot gov

Join our mailing list by emailing strudel-community+subscribe@lbl.gov

Visit us on GitHub and join the Discussion


STRUDEL is an open source ecosystem founded by members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Scientific Data (SciData) Division's UX team. Currently stakeholders are from the SciData UX team along with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC Berkeley Open Source Program Office (OSPO), Superbloom Design, The Carpentries, and 2i2c. The project is generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Liz Vu & Josh Greenberg Program Officers, grants G-2022-19360, G-2023-21098, and G-2024-22557.