One of my projects as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley involved my skill as a UI designer with the expert programming and systems administration skills of a few of my peers. Together with Graham Melcher, Ian Tegebo, Chris Cowart, and Matt Royal, I worked with Kimmen Sjolander of the bioinformatics department to author and propose a report on the importance of standards, interoperability, and usable user interface design to bioinformatics researchers.

Believe it or not, the most widely-used protein sequencing research system in the nation involved a slow, proprietary system that spat out results via an email message to its user, perhaps hours after a request was made. The web-based interface was clunky, unintuitive, and, most importantly, unusable without serious face-to-face training.

I worked with my team as a user interface designer to create a usable interface for our application, coded in Ruby on Rails. I implemented auto-suggest textboxes, AJAX pagination, and AJAX commenting.

Our paper about the importance of usability, interoperability, and standards-compliance was published on campus in a semesterly biology journal. I’ve also made it available below.