Whether you’re implementing a brand new software solution or updating an existing solution, changes that affect the workflow of team members are often a major pain point for organizations. Taking steps to manage and communicate these changes and their benefits to your users can greatly reduce the friction faced during implementation and, in turn, increase adoption by users. As you prepare to transition to the new LabKey Server UI (being released as part of LabKey Server v17.3), we encourage you to take the following steps to help manage this change and help make the UI transition a success.

Test the Redesigned Interface

Test the new interface extensively in your staging and/or test environments. As part of the 17.2 release of LabKey Server, we included the “Core UI Migration” experimental feature that allows administrators to turn on the new UI. While the interface is still in active development and certain elements may shift slightly, the bulk of the navigation changes are represented, and we encourage administrators to explore the new UI and test for:

Changes to your primary user workflows (editors, readers, administrators, etc.)
Go through the workflows of your primary users; click through the available buttons and navigate through the interface as your user would, checking for changes to their standard workflows.

Broken customizations
Check to see that customizations you have made to the interface are still functioning as expected. As part of the UI redesign, we have refactored a good portion of our own CSS in order to make it easier to maintain the platform in the long run. As a result customizations made to your server’s CSS may need updating.

UI bugs that should be reported to LabKey
Reporting bugs that you encounter during testing is an important part of the redesign process. Your feedback helps us identify and prioritize fixes that need to be made to the interface.

Identifying updates that need to be made to your server customizations and changes to your user workflows early will give you the opportunity to make adjustments and prepare for any new-interface training that might need to be done with users.

Set a Go Live Date

Decide on a date that you will make the transition to the new UI. Make sure you account for adequate time to test the new version, communicate upcoming changes and your transition plan, and train users on the new UI.

Communicate Upcoming Changes and Transition Plan

Communicating upcoming changes and their implications for your users early and often is crucial to a smooth interface transition. When communicating details about the interface transition to users, make sure to include information about:

• Transition timeline
• Key benefits of the transition
• Key changes/potential areas of frustration
• How users can ask questions
• How users can provide feedback

Provide User Training

Some of the changes being made to the LabKey Server interface during this redesign will affect how users perform certain tasks. If you discover through testing the interface in the context of your team’s key workflows that core tasks are affected by navigation changes, then providing training on how to accomplish this work in the new interface will help avoid frustration. For smaller changes, simply documenting the new process may be sufficient training, but in cases where a user’s workflow is significantly changed a training session may be more appropriate.

Answer Questions

Even with thorough testing, communication, and training, questions from your users are still inevitable. Develop and communicate how users can ask questions as they are are adjusting to the redesigned interface. Depending on the size of your team, that may mean communicating who the contact person is for questions, you may create a message board for questions and discussion, or you may host a handful of Q&A workshop sessions post-implementation. Whatever the method, making sure a user knows how they can have their questions answered will help prevent frustration when they encounter a change to their workflow.

Provide Feedback

Communicating feedback to the LabKey team is an essential part of the redesign process, and we are committed to making sure that you and your users have the best possible experience using LabKey Server. As you explore the redesigned interface in your test environment as an experimental feature, you can provide feedback using the “Give Feedback” button in the top right corner of the interface. You can also provide feedback directly to your LabKey account manager.

Related Resources

• FAQs: LabKey Server Redesign
• LabKey Server Gets a Refresh
• Docs: New User Interface 

LabKey partners at the Allen Institute for Cell Science are doing things a little differently. Launched in 2014 with a contribution from founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, the Institute was formed to integrate diverse technologies and approaches to study the cell as an integrated system. They are asking fundamental questions about cellular behavior to better understand healthy and pathological cells. Data and tools developed by the Institute are made publicly available to researchers around the world.

The Allen Institute for Cell Science team uses genome editing to add fluorescent markers to proteins in key cellular machinery and uses light microscopy to study the organization of that machinery and how it changes. During the generation of genome edited cell lines, they conduct quality control steps, including genotyping, stem cell marker analysis, karyotype testing, deep sequencing, and image-based assays. They also generate clonal lines for each gene and ensure that the cell line is useful for long term experiments. This work requires tracking cells, cell lines, genes, and all other quality control components through approximately 40 workflow steps.

The Allen Institute for Cell Science uses LabKey Server to capture metadata and assay data on each gene, cell, cell line, clone, and vector at each stage in the workflow: information that was previously housed in spreadsheets and raw data files. The Institute relies on the integrated views and query-ability of their LabKey managed data to efficiently identify target cells/cell lines to explore. Their use of LabKey Server also allows them to track the status of each entity as it makes its way through the processing pipeline, as well as monitor their complete workflow.

By centralizing their data, the Allen Institute for Cell Science will be able to accelerate their analysis and use insights gathered about their workflow to optimize their operations.

[vc_cta h2=”” shape=”square” style=”custom” custom_background=”#ededed”]Interested in using LabKey Server to optimize your workflow and accelerate data analysis?  Contact the LabKey team for more information![/vc_cta]

In support of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Department of Energy (DoE) initiative to use large-scale computing to influence cancer science, NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program has partnered with LabKey to develop an abstraction workflow and Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline that will automate the annotation and review of free-text pathology reports.

The NCI SEER Program works to provide information on cancer statistics in an effort to reduce the burden of cancer among the U.S. Population. SEER currently collects and publishes cancer incidence and survival data from population-based cancer registries covering approximately 30 percent of the U.S. population. The registries receive at least one unstructured pathology report on the more than 450,000 cases reported annually that are used in conjunction with other sources to abstract relevant information on the cases.

The initial version of the application will allow SEER to identify and select pathology reports of interest using a Linguamatics-based text-mining tool and make them available in a LabKey Server portal for manual annotation and abstraction of key elements. An annotation and task management pipeline will manage the stages of the abstraction, annotation, and review process, ensuring consistency by standardizing tasks and automating the workflow. To ensure the security of data being processed and generated, the application will utilize LabKey Server’s role-based security model and facilities that ensure regulatory compliance.

Future phases of development will introduce the use of Natural Language Processing engines to further accelerate the annotation process. Manually abstracted data from the initial phase of the project will be used by DoE laboratories to help develop and train NLP algorithms that will then be used to automate the abstraction of large numbers of pathology reports.

LabKey Server for Your Research

Interested in exploring LabKey Server as a bioinformatics solution for your organization? Contact us and the LabKey team will work with you to understand your needs and help determine if LabKey is the right fit for your research.

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