Seer Bio
Optimizing a touchscreen interface
The Challenge
The Instrument Control Software (ICS), had accumulated technical debt and design inconsistency that was beginning to create real friction. This challenge extended to operators running experiments, to developers building new features, and to a product team trying to maintain visual and functional alignment between ICS and the Proteograph Analysis Software (PAS), which is the SaaS tool supporting all data analysis.
Buttons were hard to distinguish, progress indicators were difficult to read from across the lab, and the growing divergence between ICS and PAS meant every new feature required duplicated effort to implement in both systems. Left unaddressed, these issues would compound in cost and complexity as the platform scaled.
The Approach
FreshForm partnered with Seer's product and engineering teams to lead a structured UX and UI redesign of the ICS, beginning with a full audit of existing screens and components before any design decisions were made. The redesign prioritized the realities of the lab environment, including larger text and buttons for faster recognition, clearer next-action indicators, enhanced readability from a distance, and ergonomic improvements to reduce operator fatigue during high-touch workflows like deck setup and assay selection.
FreshForm introduced global style standards, a scalable component library, and integrated the Seer UI library to align ICS visually and functionally with PAS, so future development across both platforms could move from a single shared foundation rather than two parallel ones.
The Outcome
The redesigned ICS interface delivered a more intuitive, accessible experience for lab operators while significantly reducing the development complexity required to build and maintain new features.
The project was completed on time and provided more integrated design QA and support to the engineering team than originally intended, exceeding the expectations of the project.
