Robotics Experiment Automation: Designing for a Workflow That Does Not Yet Exist

The client is a global health technology innovator running advanced laboratory automation programs. The engagement centered on the user experience of a robotics workflow.

Designing software for laboratory robotics is unusual because the user is rarely the operator the design literature assumes. The scientist who sets up an experiment has a different mental model from the technician who runs the robot, and the robot itself has constraints (reagent volumes, mixing sequences, calibration cycles) that the human user has to respect without becoming the system's bottleneck. The health technology company needed a web application that would automate the mixing of experiments and produce instructions a robot could execute: designed from scratch because no pre-existing workflows captured the right interaction patterns.

Taller's UX/UI specialists ran user research first to map the actual workflow as scientists practice it, then built wireframes and prototypes that absorbed the iteration each user-test cycle produced. High-fidelity Figma designs were the visible deliverable, but the durable artifact is the interaction model that survives multiple lab-environment scenarios — different reagent inventories, different experiment classes, different team sizes operating the same robot. Miro, Maze, and Zeplin round out the design-research and developer-handoff substrate.

Taller's engagement produced a user-centered web app with improved UX for laboratory operators and a scalable interaction model that carries forward into new workflows.

Laboratory robotics at the research-tech scale is one of the categories where design discipline determines whether the underlying technology investment translates into operational adoption. The interaction-model artifact is the asset that lets the health technology company research roadmap multiply the workflows the app supports without re-investing in the underlying UX from scratch each time.