The culmination of two years’ work by the Pistoia Alliance project team, the UXLS Toolkit provides material on UX education, methods and use cases compiled especially for life scientists. It is pitched at busy UX specialists, in silico analysts and bench scientists in an easily, accessible self-help style who all need better software. UX for Life Sciences Toolkit was created to enable businesses to adopt UX principles and methods as they develop scientific software.

UX is a powerful tool for supporting the creation of effective and usable interfaces. Whilst UX is relatively widespread, the full potential of UX is still to be realised in the life sciences. The goal of this project is to empower life science professionals to get the most from these UX resources. The unique selling point of the UXLS toolkit is its focus on issues faced in developing digital products specifically for R&D in the life science and healthcare environments. More generally, it is a useful resource about the often forgotten area of UX, and the toolkit’s core ideas should be transferable to any research area. This new toolkit might be of particular interest to the RSE community who develop software products for a range of research areas.

Additionally, the Pistoia Alliance UXLS Project Team will be holding its inaugural USA conference at Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, on Tuesday 15th May 2018.