Four Principles Driving the Evolution of the Dotmatics R&D Platform
The evolution of the Dotmatics R&D platform over the past 18 months, following its merger with Insightful Science, is driven by four key principles—user experience, platform configurability and openness, workflow composability and flexibility, and data accessibility and composability—with 2023 efforts focused on creating an intuitive, coherent user interface, simplifying navigation, modernizing design, enhancing contextual cues, and integrating customer feedback to support efficient, collaborative, and accessible scientific research workflows.
It’s been over 18 months since Insightful Science and Dotmatics united with the goal of helping innovators harmonize their science and data. In 2022, a foundation was laid for building a powerful R&D platform by expanding the product portfolio and team, and beginning to unite these products on an end-to-end data platform to support process efficiency, collaboration, data accessibility, and decision making.
Efforts in 2023 are inspired by what customers say matters most to researchers: user experience, platform configurability and openness, workflow composability and flexibility, and data accessibility and composability.
User Experience
A powerful R&D platform must also be highly usable. As Dotmatics integrates its growing portfolio, creating an intuitive, high-quality user experience is a top priority. The aim is to simplify complex endeavors for customers, ensuring solutions are helpful rather than complicating.
In 2023, the focus will be on creating a contiguous, continuous, and coherent user experience. Users should always know where they came from, where they are, and what to do next. Investments include:
- Simplifying navigation across and within capabilities
- Modernizing the look and feel
- Enhancing layout and form responsiveness
- Simplifying capability names and relationships to reduce cognitive load
- Implementing outcome-focused task completion
- Upgrading ELN and Data Management protocols and projects to include the latest UX
Maintaining contextual cues as users navigate the product and workflows is also a priority. This includes improving visibility into statuses and relationships between items in notebook, inventory, registration, and request management systems (e.g., compound, batch, sample, request, and experiment IDs).
User experience impacts every facet of the product, serving as a foundational investment. Customer and user feedback is being incorporated through user research testing.
Platform Configurability and Openness
Dotmatics recognizes that a single vendor cannot provide every solution an R&D team needs. The goal is not to replace all tools, but to get them working in unison for better collaboration and innovation. Key aspects include:
- Configurability: Allowing customers to personalize the platform to expose specific tools, systems, databases, and workflows that support unique research processes and create a streamlined user experience.
- Openness: Facilitating inclusion of third-party or internally-developed products via APIs, allowing their integration into workflows and enabling data flow.
In 2023, the team will balance configurability and openness with maintainability, upgradability, and usability. An API-first approach will help future-proof the platform.
Workflow Composability & Flexibility
Scientific workflows need to be flexible and guided, not prescriptive. Dotmatics offers pre-packaged solutions with pre-built workflows, but ensures these can be extended to accommodate change.
In 2023, the focus will be on componentizing and integrating the tech stack so users can compose unique workflows. This reduces the need for expensive, time-consuming integrations and eliminates constant switching between applications. The approach involves creating independent, interoperable modular components and providing an intuitive interface for tying them together into workflows that meet diverse R&D needs.
Data Accessibility & Composability
Easy access to in vitro, in vivo, and clinical data, along with context and correlation, is essential for valuable insights. Dotmatics Platform acquires, centralizes, standardizes, processes, stores, and exchanges data to create a united infrastructure for seamless data exchange between workflow and data components.
In 2023, data accessibility and composability remain high priorities. Dotmatics enables customers to create data systems without coding or expensive services, allowing R&D teams to collect all necessary data and metadata quickly. This data-centric approach also prepares customers to adopt technologies like predictive AI.
2023 Product Focus
Development efforts in 2023 will focus on three key areas: Dotmatics Core, Tools, and Solutions. Product names and solution groupings have been adjusted for a more intuitive user experience.
Updates within each area may include:
- Dotmatics Core: Continued integration, user-experience improvements, and enhancements in data management, notebook, inventory, screening, and instrument integration.
- Scientific Tools: Improved data flow between specialty tools and the core platform, and creation of capability sets that reflect actual user workflows.
- Dotmatics Solutions: Continued unification of capabilities, integrations, and workflows for research challenges in biology, chemistry, and formulations.
Building a Better Future Together
Dotmatics supports customers in delivering breakthrough therapies, novel formulations, new materials, and sustainable foods by improving the collaboration of tools, data, and people.
We Want to Hear from You
Feedback is welcomed from current customers and those seeking solutions to specific challenges on how Dotmatics can best support innovation.
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