Hello!

January saw us share our release product with working scientists in user experience research. This is a big milestone for Sundog: opening up our release product to users we don’t know!

Alex has more on how the UX research went, and Tom has some notes on how we’re thinking about design at Sundog.

If you’d like to see what it is we’re making, Tom talks through the latest updates to the product in our latest video update.

Alex Mitchell | CEO Update

We did our first round of UX research in January. We wanted to know how we could make using Sundog a better experience before getting it into the hands of our very first customers. It was important to get an unbiased read on what we were doing, so we specifically recruited scientists we’d not met before - rather than going to the friends and sponsors who have been with Sundog from the start.

This was an uncomfortable thing to do! We’ve been working on Sundog for long enough to have a clear perspective on both our users and how our software should work for them. UX testing had the potential to expose flaws, both in what we are building, and in our thinking about the problem itself. This felt more personal than any customer or user research I’d been a part of before; it felt like a referendum on whether we’d wasted a year of our lives.

Obviously, our UX testing went well. I’d be writing a considerably different newsletter if it hadn’t! People understood and recognized the problem we want to solve, and we understood how to make Sundog nicer for them to use. That’s led to a list of short- to medium-term improvements - ways to highlight information better, ways to make frequent interactions more slick - that we’ll roll out before our second round of testing.

Excitingly, our participants also had ideas we hadn’t even considered for how they could use the Sundog product as it stands. One of these was using Sundog to teach and to learn from new lab members. Both new and experienced scientists told us that they’d start by working together “live,” discussing in real-time what they saw and how to interpret it. Over time, as they (or their student) became more confident, they’d switch to marking up an image for feedback in Sundog itself. It’s a reminder that once Sundog is out there we will be used - and useful - in ways that we didn’t anticipate as we built.

This helps us to understand the question beyond “did we build the right product to solve this problem.” It helps us to understand whether the product - and the company - that we’re building can be big. What we saw is a first indication that Sundog has a right to a place in a scientist’s life and work; a right to be a part of their routine.

Over the life of this company, we’ll do many tests of our ideas. It’s always going to feel uncomfortable. These tests matter because they are the first, because we can use what we learned to make a better product - and because we can use what we learned to make a bigger product, that is more embedded in our users’ everyday.

Tom Armitage | CTO Update

Complex tools for professionals - like Sundog - are often unintuitive to new users. I don’t think this is a problem at all, but it is a challenge for a designer.

We have to strike a balance: not so complicated that it’s off-putting, but not so simple that it’s no good for the tasks it needs to perform. Instead of thinking about ease of initial use, we are designing for learnability - how easy is it to get better? Does a thing you have learned in one part of it apply elsewhere? Do the concepts reinforce one another? Can you find your way around it as it changes and grows?

The two pillars of Sundog’s design that I focus on to achieve this are information architecture (IA) and interaction design. Those two terms are at opposite ends of the design spectrum - the former, how the information and ideas in the product are organised conceptually, the latter, how the moment-to-moment interactions a user has with the product play out.

Our early and constant focus on information architecture has paid off time and time again. In terms of the Sundog product, IA means: how are the core concepts the user works with - labs, experiments, files - structured and related? How is that structure conveyed in the product itself? Which concepts already exist, and which need inventing?

Getting this as right as we can early pays off in the long run. It isn’t just about having a strong conceptual core; it’s about making all subsequent design work easier. You can tell when the design of a product isn’t aligned with the IA; it’s both hard to design with, and hard to use.

Strong IA leads into strong site structure. We think a lot about URLs at Sundog. Our Stack Viewer is a rich, interactive, desktop-like experience - but the rest of the product is much more like a traditional web-application, and that means pages and resources. Wayfinding and navigation around those resources is a critical part of good user experience in the product; having strong IA makes it much easier for us to understand what pages we need, and how they relate. For me, this is a critical part of the product’s design.

Everything in Sundog has a URL is a principle we introduced early on. Scientists always respond well to this - they use bookmarking/citation tools heavily, and as a result love things with URLs. But it’s also a practice that helps us keep on top of the product IA, even when it’s technically complex, because it reinforces the concepts of the product. For instance, even objects on the StackViewer have URLs: as you navigate between annotations and comments, your browser’s location bar updates. If you paste the URL to a comment into a new window, you’ll jump straight to that annotation on a StackViewer, the comment thread open at the right place, your view zoomed to what the other user saw when they made the comment.

Interaction design - at the other end of the design spectrum from IA - has largely taken a backseat so far, as we focus on getting the right data and functionality in the right places. As we understand the ways people use the product - from both testing and early customers - the needs of the moment-to-moment product design will come into better focus.

Some of the Sundog product has focused on interaction design from day one: most notably, the StackViewer. It’s critical to the product that it’s alive - full-screen, real-time, delightful and slick - from day one. This is part of Sundog where how it feels to use is critical, and a unique selling point.

In the coming months, that rich, live interaction design will arrive elsewhere in the product. For now, emphasising robust IA has been the right priority.

Our early user research has been invaluable, as Alex writes. It’s also been reassuring: our IA makes sense, and it makes sense for the kind of work our users want to do. Without training or explanation, they can build a broad understanding of the tool. More sophisticated parts - the StackViewer, notably - are familiar to those experienced with tools like Photoshop, and understandably less so to those not. The solution is not going to be “making it more intuitive” or over-optimising for initial use; it will be onboarding, training, and building resources to help people become more fluent in the product.

They’ve also helped identify some ‘quick wins’ that we can implement before our second round of testing, that help iron out some issues where the IA or interaction design wasn’t working hard enough.

And for me, they’ve gotten us over the hump of showing this product to new people. In all our tests, however the users found it, the product just worked: no errors, no strangeness, nothing to apologise for. As stressful as I find watching user research, it was also a genuine delight to see people new to us explore the product, and start to think about what it could do for them.

This month has seen us extend our thinking about how Sundog should work for our users, and how our users will make Sundog work for them. As always, thank you for following along as we build Sundog, and as always, we’d love to hear from you. Just reply to this newsletter, or email alexandra@sundog.bio.