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MYLAB aims to make the lab life of practitioners more manageable an open and shared platform that allows users to reserve machines and track the status of machines.
Individual work
2 weeks
Problem space defined
Figma
He had his experiment all planned out, but the machine was already in use. Now, he has to rearrange his schedule.
When he was ready to use the machine, it was taken, so he did other tasks while waiting. After a long wait, he came back and found it occupied again.
Lab members in the same research laboratory typically focus on similar research topics. This means the machines that are required for their experiments are often identical, and there are usually not enough machines for everyone to use simultaneously. However, they do not share their daily experiment schedules with each other, which often results in conflicts over machine usage.
*Note: Lab equipment is not necessarily all in the main laboratory space.
Lab members in biology-related laboratories tend to use sticky notes as reminders to notify other lab members that they are still using the machine. However, using sticky notes as reminders might raise some issues:
It is common to use sticky notes to store important information about the machine such as property codes, people who are responsible for the machine, insurance expiration date, contact numbers, and so on. However, stinky notes have some flaws in being an information carrier.
The main idea of MYLAB is a real-time list of the availability of equipment in a laboratory and provide machine reservation service.
MYLAB encompasses four main functions including: Quick reservation, Real-time display of machine availability, Machine maintenance tracking, and Notifications.
The vast majority of primary research on MYLAB came from traditional observation and contextual inquiry. I didn’t have much chance to conduct a sufficient number of one-on-one, in-person interviews at that time. However, conducting user interviews is a way of generating insights by delving more into the results gathered from observation and contextual inquiry.
Digital ethnography might be a feasible way to dive more into this "everyday" topic since the lack of user interviews and there are little research articles discussing about this topic.
