ChemAxon Plexus Design

SUMMARY
Project scope: Create a new product suite based on ChemAxon's existing solutions
Target audience: Chemists working in drug discovery
Business challenge: Provide a next-generation drug discovery tool for the in silico phase
My role: information architecture, screen design, prototyping, user testing
Stakeholders: product owner/business analyst, back end and front-end developers

The problem

ChemAxon already had an impressive range of tools which were used in drug discovery. Since the company was founded in 1998, some of the tools’ had command-line interface, and later Java-based applications. In the mid-2010 the time has come to switch to the new GUI framework: web-based applications.

It wasn’t only the framework that needed renewal. As years went by, a vast range of features piled up in the products, and on the interfaces. We had to validate those features and ditch a lot of them, while concentrating on others. Building Plexus Suite meant also redesigning the workflows as well.

The process

ChemAxon is in a unique situation: the company’s business analysts are chemists who worked on the field, many of them having their own registered patents. They know their domain and the R&D processes in depth, and they have good relationships throughout the professional community. Thanks to this, we managed to do on site and remote user interviews and tests, using prototypes or the actual product.

Plexus Suite consists of many components, and Plexus Design is one of the offerings with multiple components.