UI Design for an Engineering Process: Programming Experiments on a Liquid Handling Robot

In this paper we describe the development of a user interface for a liquid handling robot. We describe the user interface design process that we carried out, beginning with requirements analysis and rapid prototyping, followed by heuristic evaluation. We then demonstrate the resulting cloud interface where the robot is controlled remotely in a teleoperation mode to program common protocols in chemistry, and biology, laboratories. We describe the main characteristics of the web interface, focusing on solution strategies used to expose features for programming experiments, remotely. We also report on the System Usability Scale (SUS) scores obtained by testing the interface with 15 experts in the fields of chemistry, and biology.