UppBio

UppBio is a biomanufacturing startup developing an algorithm and SaaS platform to help research and development scientists model, analyze, collaborate, and make research decisions.

Through Springboard’s UX Design Bootcamp, I joined a team of designers for a four-week internship to design UppBio’s dashboard and redesign its website landing page. My contributions included secondary research, a competitive review of Teselagen, dashboard sketches, and Pathfinder design.

The challenge

UppBio needed a dashboard that brought its core research tools together and a landing page that communicated the product more clearly.

Our dashboard work focused on searching, designing, and building molecules. The website required clearer calls to action, reorganized navigation, and more consistent interface elements.

We began with a limited user definition and limited knowledge of the biomanufacturing domain, so research was essential.

Understanding the domain and competitors

I began with secondary research to understand the industry and become familiar with comparable products.

Using a shortlist provided by the client, our team reviewed LatchBio, Teselagen, Ganymede, and Benchling. I focused on Teselagen, examining its capabilities, interface, and strengths and weaknesses.

Our competitive analysis highlighted an opportunity to bring the core tasks of searching, designing, and building molecules together within one application. This finding became the central direction for our dashboard design.

Exploring the dashboard

Each designer sketched possible dashboard layouts. We reviewed these explorations together and combined selected ideas into a shared design direction.

My sketches explored how the dashboard could organize access to Pathfinder, results, and team functionality. We used this structure to develop the mid-fidelity prototype, keeping the main workflows accessible within the application.

Developing and Delivering the design

We produced a mid-fidelity prototype covering the dashboard and redesigned landing page. I contributed to the Pathfinder design, including its search interface, properties view, and Builder screen.

The dashboard concept supported:

• Searching: Finding organisms and molecules through Pathfinder and viewing related properties.

• Designing and building: Accessing the Builder to manually design molecules.

• Reviewing results: Viewing search outputs and exporting results to Benchling.

These decisions reflected the opportunity identified through our competitive analysis: bringing the main research workflows together in a single workspace.

Alongside the dashboard, we redesigned the landing page. We consolidated the navigation, expanded the product information hero section, added calls to action, and fixed inconsistent and broken interface elements.

Reflection

This project strengthened my ability to research an unfamiliar technical domain and translate competitive findings into a design direction. It also gave me experience collaborating asynchronously, combining individual contributions into a shared solution, and progressing toward a defined deliverable with limited initial information.