Empathizing with users is a concept drilled into designers from day 1. We position ourselves to embrace user frustrations and complaints, so that we may better understand problems and solution for them intentionally. However, interfacing with customers is an opportunity that many people within an organization do not have. Part of our job as designers is to help bridge this divide between customers and internal stakeholders by holding up a customer lens for others to look through.
R&D Bench Race strives to provide an alternative lens into the Benchling customer experience. The game hinges on the complexities of resource management and tracking throughout the R&D lifecycle, and underlines an often overlooked precept: software solutions should not get in the way of science.
The game involves 6 different types of cards: Events, Funding, People, Biosample, Data, and Processes. These card types align with (what our team believed to be) primary elements needed for a biotech company to develop a novel drug.
Some of the Event cards are specific to Benchling, highlighting specific ways the platform can both help or hinder scientific discovery and development. The outcomes or consequences of playing one of the Benchling Event cards align with the relative impact the event has on users in the product. For example, a Benchling server outage event prevents a player from advancing phases for the next 2 turns.
In the final 2 days of hackathon week, we conducted play tests in Figjam where each player was given a sequestered section for their playing hand, and allowed access to the central play area containing the cards, Benchling bucks, phases, and personal bench boards. The play tests gave us a better sense of 2 things: how long the game takes, and how to refine the 'resource economy'. The latter will probably take many more rounds of play testing to get right, but at least we were made aware of the most glaring resource imbalances.
Our hackathon team won the 'A Better Benchling' award, and given a session at the company's Build Kick Off to let folks play with print-out cards in person! For this upcoming hackathon I hope to revisit this game to further refine it, design better cards, and actually get it professionally printed and boxed. I think it would make for fantastic marketing.
