Designing for Decision Making

User/Developer Experience Webinars feature speakers who highlight best practices and challenges for usable scientific software. Have a suggestion for a future meeting? Use this Google form to propose ideas.

May’s webinar focuses on design principles for usable systems and simple decision making.

Mike Morrison will speak first, acknowledging that science is hard. But sometimes it’s hard for inefficient, fixable reasons — like outdated publishing systems and bad communication. In Mike’s talk, you will learn how user experience design principles can speed up science, improve your own scientific communication, make doing science more fun and streamlined. All of this will be communicated through live demos, silly graphics, and games.

Following this introduction of design principles, Leah Kim, UX designer at Fermilab, will present a case study of their application. In safety-critical environments, every second counts, and human attention is limited. Leah will share lessons from redesigning the Alarms application used by accelerator operators. Through observation, empathy, and iterative design, she explores how understanding cognitive load, attention, and operational context can guide interfaces that help users focus on what truly matters, reduce stress, and support safe decision-making.

Presenters

• Mike Morrison (Curvenote)
• Leah Kim (Fermilab)

Organizer

• Johanna (Hannah) Cohoon (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)

Presenter bios

Dr. Mike Morrison is a designer and psychologist who is trying to speed up scientific discovery by creating new, more efficient designs for tools that scientists use every day. He’s most known for creating the viral ‘#BetterPoster’ movement and YouTube cartoons that affect how hundreds of thousands of studies are communicated. Mike has been invited to give workshops on design and communication at many organizations including Harvard, Stanford, the US Centers for Disease Control, Microsoft Research, and Johns Hopkins. He is currently the Lead User Experience Designer at Curvenote, where he helps design the future of scientific publishing.

Leah Kim is a UX designer with a background in human–computer interaction from the University of Washington, Seattle. She previously worked at Boeing for five years designing complex systems for expert technical users, and recently joined Fermilab’s ACORN project, helping modernize the lab’s accelerator control systems with a focus on usability and human-centered design.

Organizer bio

Johanna (Hannah) Cohoon is a User Experience Researcher at LBNL, seeking to create more rewarding and impactful careers for research software engineers and more efficient and enjoyable experiences for users. She has focused on studying and facilitating open source development, open science practices, and data intensive workflows. Hannah earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.