Case Study: Configuration Redesign for Genologics
GENOLOGICS (now Illumina), creates software in the genomics space – in an industry undergoing explosive growth in the context of specific health regulations. Illumina (the company who acquired Genologics, created the hardware to make genomic sequencing much cheaper).
The software they built is called Clarity – it’s a Genomics Lab Information Management Software or ‘LIMS’.
The overall sample’s journey through to sequencing. Clarity is used at step 3- where the scientist inputs data about their sample into the system.
Configuration project
I worked on this product for nearly 3 years, working predominantly on reimagining their configuration featureset. The genomics field is a very new field, as a result labs operate in diverse ways. As a response Clarity provided a lot of value by giving their users the ability to configure and extend a system as needed. This allowed the product to cater to a range of lab types from small startups like Baby Genes all the way to larger established companies like Mayo Clinic.
Our goal in redesigning configuration was to reduce training hours by field scientists and support tickets as well as improve the learning curve for users. At that time, users had to deal with an immense amount of context switching (to a separate java application) and had to memorize a lot of backwards logic to gain proficiency in Clarity configuration.
Over 1 year of development (the same number of story points as V1 of the product) with a budget of 20 developers, QA and team leads, we released Clarity 5.0 which:
- Reduced training time for new users from 3 days to 1.5 days
- Reduced support hours by about 4 days per month
- Saved users about 10 hours in getting their systems up and running
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