Modernizing Scientific Software Through Product Design Strategy

Overview

A materials-science software ecosystem built over nearly two decades had become a business risk: its structure reflected the instruments it controlled rather than the research its customers were doing. Scientists had to use the software to run their instruments — which masked how poorly it supported their actual workflows.

I led product design strategy for the modernization, shaping a platform direction organized around research workflows rather than instruments and translating it into models, principles, and decision frameworks teams could use across planning and delivery.

The Challenge

Left to accumulate, that structure produced consequences across the product line:

• Experiences organized around instruments rather than researcher goals
• Inconsistent interaction patterns across applications
• Overlapping functionality and duplicated effort
• Deep, nonstandard navigation that buried common actions and relied on learned conventions
• Limited scalability for future capabilities

The challenge was not redesigning software — it was defining a modernization strategy without disrupting the workflows scientists depended on every day.

The Strategic Insight

The platform was organized around instruments. Its customers were not. Each instrument ran in its own desktop environment, producing isolated experiments, fragmented data, and no practical path to collaboration. Scientists manually transposed results into their own datasets to perform the cross-experiment analysis their work actually required.

I recognized that mismatch and used it to reframe the challenge from improving individual applications to reconsidering the platform’s organizing principle.

Research workflows were tightly coupled to individual instruments and desktop applications. Comparing or aggregating results across experiments required manual export and local workarounds — the platform was not built for collaboration.

Defining the Product Design Vision

Beneath the surface, researchers followed a more consistent structure that mirrored the scientific method: planning experiments, running analyses, interpreting results, managing studies, and sharing insights. The instruments enabled parts of that process, but they were not the organizing principle for the work as a whole.

I proposed a product design model centered on those research activities rather than on individual instruments — a change to the experience’s organizing principle, not just its feature set. The vision included reusable test templates, consistent cross-sample analysis, and a foundation for carefully governed algorithmic assistance.

The workflow model gave teams a shared language for platform planning. They used it to prioritize work and align on what the modernization was actually for.

Product Design Strategy & Modernization Principles

The direction needed to survive contact with hundreds of individual decisions across teams and products. I translated it into principles teams could apply consistently:

Designed to replace instrument-specific silos with a single shared research environment.

Aligning the Organization Around a Shared Direction

A platform direction only matters if the organization can act on it. I brought the workflow model into roadmap planning and stakeholder reviews — not as a design reference, but as a shared tool for evaluating priorities and tradeoffs. That changed the unit of discussion: teams had been prioritizing feature requests without a common basis for comparison. The model gave them one.

• Evaluate proposed investments against researcher needs rather than the loudest internal request
• Identify where to consolidate redundant work — and where consolidation would not pay off
• Connect customer needs to business objectives in terms both sides recognized

Because the platform ran mission-critical laboratory operations, sequencing decisions — what to reorganize first, what to leave stable — were as consequential as the vision itself, and they were made against the same shared model.

Scaling Design Across a Growing Organization

As modernization expanded, inconsistency became a delivery risk — every team solving the same problems independently was a tax on throughput. I initiated and led the design-system effort: reusable components, interaction patterns, shared principles, and governance that shifted recurring design decisions from one-off project work into shared infrastructure.

From Strategy to Product Decisions

Strategy is only credible if it changes what gets built. Translating the workflow-centered principle into interaction design meant replacing deeply nested menus with context-sensitive controls. When a scientist selected an object, the interface surfaced the operations relevant to that object in a contextual right rail.

Early testing validated the direction and exposed gaps. Stakeholders wanted to lock scope and move into delivery; I pushed for testing before implementation. That validation helped refine the model rather than carry legacy complexity into the new platform.

Impact