Designing User-Centered Tools for Scientists

Erin Murphy is Jane Street’s first UX designer, and before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory building user interfaces for space missions. She’s also an illustrator with her own quarterly journal. In this episode, Erin and Ron discuss the challenge of doing user-centered design in an organization where experts are used to building tools for themselves. How do you bring a command-line interface to the web without making it worse for power users? They also discuss how beauty in design is more about utility than aesthetics; what Jane Street looks for in UX candidates; and how to help engineers discover what their users really want.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• Erin’s website that shows off her work.
• Her quarterly journal of sketches and observations.
• An article about Erin’s design work with NASA JPL.
• A paper that among other things talks about the user study work that Erin did at JPL.
• Jane Street’s current UX job opening.