ONTOFORCE, the company behind DISQOVER, helps life sciences organisations accelerate research and drug development for improved patient outcomes by unlocking hidden insights from data.

To put it simply: DISQOVER seamlessly connects incredible amounts of data from various sources into one platform to enable more efficient data exploration and analysis. But such a complex product requires a top-notch user interface. And that’s a job that has In The Pocket written all over it.

Brushing up the UI of an elaborate platform

Gathering biopharmaceutical data and scientific research resources to drive the development of new treatments and solutions can take weeks if not months. DISQOVER shortens this process into a matter of hours by linking available data and bundling it in a kind of smart “Google for biopharmaceutical research”. A revolutionary platform in the world of life sciences.

Although the platform worked fine, ONTOFORCE wanted to improve it to make sure the exact right results were found. Finding something in such a huge pool of data requires a top-notch user interface. A user interface that guides you to the search results you need in the easiest way possible. So, in line with ONTOFORCE's vision to be the go-to platform for life sciences data exploration, we got down and dirty with the UI specs of the platform.

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Understand, define, improve‍

To tackle a UI challenge this size, you can’t just fly in and try to fix stuff. A thorough and broader approach is essential. Our team of strategists and designers started out with a deep dive into DISQOVER itself: finding out more about the target audience, value proposition and current user flows. Simultaneously, we invited a batch of users and stakeholders to interview them about the actual pains and gains of the platform.

With a blueprint of DISQOVER’s data ecosystem in our hands, the team started pinpointing bottlenecks, difficulties and inconsistencies that interfered with a user’s flow. Starting from a well-defined problem, we were able to define the right solutions for a revamped user interface.

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Rethinking the search method

The revamped UI focused on a new universal search bar, acting as the starting point to access an incredible amount of data. The search bar automatically makes suggestions to your query and shows you the number of hits and which category your hits are in. Ultimately, we nudge the user to unify their complex search queries into a single sentence, giving them quick access to the data they’re looking for.

Additionally, we moved DISQOVER away from its default dashboard view to initiate search queries. Again, by focusing on the universal search bar, we tried to steer away from any unintended complexity and gave the user a straightforward path to finding the data they were looking for.

Furthermore, we created a set of guiding principles to sanity-check every future development decision. This helped us to prioritise features according to their actual impact on making the data platform a pleasure to use.

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Building a clickable prototype

Combining our user insights, the value proposition, the complex target audience and guiding principles, we could build our way to an MVP. All of our findings poured down into a completely restructured user interface with new UI mechanisms. Every single one of them more adapted to the user’s needs, patterns and flows.

From there on, ONTOFORCE continued converting our prototypes into the actual platform. Based on our insights and proof of concepts, they keep incrementally building and tweaking DISQOVER into the most user-friendly life sciences data platform anyone can wish for.

‍The outcome‍

After an intense track and numerous journeys through the staggering maze of data silos, we showed how ONTOFORCE could shape DISQOVER into a more user-friendly platform. DISQOVER is now even better suited to serve life sciences professionals around the world towards quicker and better results. And most importantly: in a more intuitive and user-friendly way.