Small Is Beautiful is a 2-credit course geared towards building a citizen cyberscience project focused on nanotechnology. Citizen cyberscience refers to bringing the general public onboard a science project through the use of readily-available technology.
My partner, Robin Reid, and myself worked with Montclare Labs to conceptualize a project for crowd-sourcing data on proteins being assembled in their lab. Montclare Labs is researching proteins for cancerous cells.
The project is essentially a tablet app with an emphasis on tracing proteins to establish the size of the proteins. The proteins images are captured on micrographs. The purpose of crowd-sourcing the tracing data is to establish an average of the protein size for each protein in the micrograph. This data is then used to determine whether proteins are too large or too small, which affects whether the human will expel or retain the proteins.
Robin and I wireframed the userflow for this app. The wireframes were built in Omnigraffle. While Omnigraffle is a very capable program for this type of work, it made me realize how outdated it feels. I need to find more resources for wireframing—one notable resource is Foundation by Zurb. I like the idea of coding my wireframes. This blogpost does a great job explaning why.
Below are the wireframes and userflow for the app.
