Data Mapping, Cleansing, and Alignment

Challenge

Your research is done; your paper has been accepted. “What do you mean, did I clean my data?!?”

 

Business Needs

    1. Empower scientists to normalize data, efforlessly
    2. Centralize data at  Memoral Sloan Kettering (MSK)

User Concerns

    1. Have no idea that they need to clean their data
    2. Don’t have data themselves but still need to find answers
    3. Want to share data but IRB restrictions are a consideration 

Solution

Create a Self-Service Research Data Curation app

Introduction

A major challenge for researchers at MSK is that valuable data points are often buried in unstructured text within doctors’ notes. As a result, many manually curate data into spreadsheets for their research projects. Over the past few years, my UX team and I have developed solutions to capture this curation process and transform it into a reusable data asset.

We conducted extensive user research, interviewing researchers and building prototypes to refine the experience. Our efforts led to the improvement of MSK Extract, a tool now available to all MSK researchers. MSK Extract enables researchers to:

  • Create a curation database without needing SQL or ER diagram knowledge.
  • Import spreadsheet data into a custom database
  • Map data elements to MSK’s standard terminology.
  • Share curated data with MSK for reuse

Our intuitive design has made adoption seamless, with some researchers onboarding without needing training materials. Over the past three years, more than 300 databases have been created using MSK Extract, streamlining research workflows and improving data accessibility.
John Philip’s original wires in Balsamic

Design Example

Hundreds of design decisions were made throughout the process. Since, the Double Diamond flow below can’t capture these micro-details, I’ve extracted a simple one that covers how these are derived.

The takeway from the below is: sometimes you know an applicable solution that you can incorporate into your designs. 

In user interviews while reviewing MSK Extract, most researcher were purplxed at the opening screen. 

While the team wanted to make the app friendly with a personalized greeting, the UI wasn’t clear about what the users should do. 

We see several cards all with the same weight, items that are clickable are not easily identified, and the copy is verbose. 

Users we’re also confused by the “Shop” menu link. “What am I going to buy here?” was a common comment.

Wizard, a native Apple app that I have used for well over a decade, makes finding patterns in data really fun. I always have admired the onboarding process – because there are ALOT of moving parts in the application.

One of the best things is the introduction journey; where the creators have given yo a simple data set to play with to explore features.

We call this a “Warm Welcome” and I knew that this was the proper way to re-invent the home page on MSK Extract. 

Diving deep into what our users would like to see, I created our own version of the “Warm Welcome”.

In this wireframe deliverable, made in Figma and exported to .pdf, we can see that I have eliminated confusion over what to do.

  1. What the application does is explained.
  2. Also clear is what you can do.
  3. There is a clear, primary call to action.

I stole the idea of create a sample product with easy data to onboard noobies – and gave them other options for people who have a different way of consuming data (tours or plain old documentation!)