Benchling Analysis: Making meaningful sense of experimental data
What
Charting and data transformation tool for scientists to understand and visualize assay results
Who
Lead Product Designer, overseeing another Product Designer and working closely with a Product Manager and Engineering team
When
2023 (product launched June 2024)
Benchling is the leading cloud platform for biotech R&D. Benchling’s flagship products, such as Notebook and Workflows, enable scientists to plan studies, collaborate, and record structured experimental data. However, a key part of scientists’ work - analyzing experimental data - was done outside of Benchling, resulting in fragmented workflows, time spent on data processing, and inconsistent data.
In June 2024, we launched Insights Analysis, our new charting and data transformation tool. This tool lets lab scientists convert raw data from scientific instruments into meaningful results with just a few clicks.
Problem
Raw data from instruments need to be cleaned up and processed (for example, doing linear regressions and curve fitting) to produce meaningful answers to experimental questions that guide the next round of experiments.
Insights Dashboards is a powerful tool, but requires users to write SQL, which doesn’t match the preferences and capabilities of a lab scientist.
We offered an existing analytics tool, Insights Dashboards, but it required users to write SQL queries to extract data from Benchling. However, most lab scientists don’t know how to write SQL, so this tool was inaccessible to our core user base. Instead, they had to rely on other software (such as Excel, JMP, Prism) or cumbersome workarounds just to create simple charts.
Why was it important that we solve this problem?
All scientists need to analyze raw data. All companies want to consolidate their software stack. A native analysis tool inside Benchling would offer a seamless end-to-end experience for lab scientists, while improving Benchling’s value proposition to IT departments.
Solution
We built a point-and-click data analysis tool, Insights Analysis, to help lab scientists analyze raw experimental data and do exploratory data work (for example, “Let’s see if this protein is doing what I want”). Here are some of the main capabilities:
Query data from Benchling without writing SQL: We built a point-and-click dataset creation tool that allows users to traverse data structures to curate tables with all the metadata they want.
Add multiple views (tables or charts) from the same set of data: This enables common scientific use cases that require aggregating data at different levels, such as “Show me averaged results by sample and individual results by replicate”.
See charts and tables: The analysis tool allows users to join, transform and chart data, as well as apply assay acceptance criteria by creating filters, writing logical formulas, and calculating standard deviations.
Edit a view: Views can also be used to filter and section data for further transformation. For example, '“Create a standard curve with only results from wells marked as [Standards]”.
Impact
After a private beta period, we launched charting & filtering capabilities in analysis tool as Open Beta in June 2024.
Instead of relying on outside analytical tools and processing data outside of Benchling, scientists can now analyze raw scientific data to understand and compare results within or across experiments - all within Benchling. With the introduction of this tool, we expect both data capture and data analysis experience to be improved (scientists ❤️ this), with full traceability of entire data pipelines and analysis flows (IT departments that make software decisions for R&D organizations ❤️ this!)
“For a beta mode, I am really impressed with how far charting is coming along. I’m grateful for the work and think it will be hugely consequential for our team.”
That was just a peek into this project - there’s a lot more good stuff to share! For a full look at my process, contact me.