Virginia Bioinformatics Institute • UX & Project Lead• patric.vbi.vt.edu

About

VBI is a research institude in genetic research for bacteria and viruses curated at the institute. This project was a web application that allowed users to browse genetic data.

Responsibilities:

Project vision and team lead
Client relations
Web app design
Information architecture

Information Architecture

The site supports a very large amount of data that can be searched in a variety of ways. This page is the home page for the bacteria Brucella.

Searching

We created the search widget on the left of the screen that quickly allowed users to select groups or separate subgroups of genes. The widget remembers your selections and carries them over from tab to tab.

On the Grid

It was important to have a good grid for displaying data. It's basic look and feel gets used throughout the site.

Content

In addition to data, templates were also created to show content about the organization and the people conducting the research. The group was extremely pleased with the work we did and this project led to other additional projects.

Behind the Scenes

KJ
Early in the project, we gathered different stakeholders and conducted a KJ (affinity diagramming) session. I hadn't had biology since high school, this was a whole new field for me and a complex one at that. This picture is a very small portion of the wall we covered with post-its of what people would want to find or do on the site.

What Content is Where?
This grid helped determine the information architecture. We needed a system that would support different levels of content depth per organism.

Sketching Flow
This little page was used as part of a clickable prototype that showed how a user would move through the site.

Wireframe
I created this wireframe for Brucella that later served as a template for the other organisms. This was a challenging project - biology is not my strong suit.