It’s been over 18 months since we united Insightful Science and Dotmatics with the goal of helping innovators better harmonize their science and data.
In 2022, we laid a foundation for building the world’s most powerful R&D platform by growing our product portfolio as well as our team. We’ve begun uniting these products on our end-to-end data platform to support better process efficiency, collaboration, data accessibility, and decision making.
Our efforts in 2023 will be inspired by what our customers tell us matters most to researchers undertaking the complex experimentation that drives innovation: user experience, platform configurability and openness, workflow composability and flexibility, and data accessibility and composability.
User Experience
The world’s most powerful R&D platform must also be the world’s most usable, otherwise that power risks going untapped. As we continue to integrate our growing portfolio of Dotmatics products, creating an intuitive, high-quality user experience is our top priority. Our customers are undertaking incredibly complex endeavors. We want to be sure our solutions are simplifying things, not complicating them.
In 2023, we will make a concerted effort to create a contiguous, continuous, and coherent user experience, so that as users move from screen to screen and capability to capability, they always know exactly where they came from, where they are, and where they need to go next to accomplish their task.
Our investments in this area will include items such as simplifying the navigation across and within capabilities, modernizing the look and feel, enhancing the capabilities and responsiveness of layouts and forms, simplifying the capability names and relationships to reduce cognitive load, implementing more outcome-focused ways of accomplishing tasks, and upgrading ELN and Data Management protocols and projects in our solutions to include the latest UX.
Importantly, we will also work to maintain contextual cues as users navigate the product and their workflows, by ensuring that each step in the workflow and links between related objects are clearer, so that the science you are doing is clearer. For example, we will improve visibility into the statuses of and relationships between items in the notebook, inventory, registration, and request management systems (e.g., compound, batch, sample, request, and experiment IDs).
The user experience impacts every facet of the overall product experience, and will therefore serve as a foundational investment for us going forward. By combining the best scientific capabilities with the best user experience, we aim to deliver a platform that will help our customers do their best work. And we will be informed by our customers and users on this journey; we have already begun the process of conducting user research testing into our designs and are incorporating much of the feedback we have received into the final product.
Platform Configurability and Openness
At Dotmatics, we know that a single vendor cannot offer every solution an R&D team needs; nor can a single platform replace scores of painstakingly crafted specialty products. We do not want to replace all the tools our customers use to innovate; but rather, we want to get those tools working in unison so that R&D teams can better collaborate and innovate. Key to doing this is:
Configurability - Allowing customers to personalize the platform to expose the specific tools, systems, databases, and workflows that will support their unique research processes and create a streamlined user experience.
Openness - Facilitating the inclusion of third-party or internally-developed products via APIs that connect these products to the Dotmatics Platform, allowing their inclusion in workflows and enabling back-and-forth data flow.
In 2023, our team will work to maintain the delicate balance needed to deliver configurability and openness, while also ensuring the solutions our customers configure will be maintainable, upgradeable, and usable in the future. We will continue to adopt an API-first approach that will help future-proof our platform as technology evolves over time.
Workflow Composability & Flexibility
We know that science isn't always linear and predictable, and as such, workflows need to be flexible and guided, rather than prescriptive. While we have created a number of pre-packaged Dotmatics solutions that help users get up and running quickly with pre-built workflows, we have also ensured those workflows can be easily and safely extended to accommodate the change so often needed in scientific exploration.
In 2023, in addition to building out our pre-packed Dotmatics Solutions, we will continue to focus on componentizing and integrating our broader tech stack so our users will be able to compose their own unique workflows. Why is this so important? Because R&D teams have suffered too long with the expensive and time-consuming integrations needed to get their tools, systems, and applications working together. We want to help make this a thing of the past. We want to eliminate the need to constantly jump between applications or haphazardly stitch them together. We first do this by creating independent and interoperable modular components for basic tasks and other user-defined objects. We then provide an intuitive interface for seamlessly tying together different components into workflows that meet the unique needs of different users across diverse R&D groups.
Data Accessibility & Composability
What’s the use of composing a workflow if your data are locked in a database and unusable? Our customers need easy access to their in vitro, in vivo, and clinical data, as well as the context, clarity, and correlation around that data, so that they can quickly garner valuable insights and answer complex questions. This is nearly impossible if data remain locked in databases. It’s different with Dotmatics. The ways in which Dotmatics Platform acquires, centralizes, standardizes, processes, stores, and exchanges data creates a united data infrastructure for seamlessly exchanging data between various workflow and data components.
In 2023, we will continue to make data accessibility and composability a high priority. You won’t find this with other vendors. Data has always been king for Dotmatics. It’s in our DNA. We think beyond uniting tools and also prioritize uniting data. We are delivering unique ways for our customers to create data systems without needing to write any code or engage an expensive service organization. As a result, R&D teams can collect all the data and metadata they need to answer pressing research questions within minutes or hours, not months or years. And by putting data first, we are also helping our customers become more data led and better prepared to adopt data-centric technologies like predictive AI.
2023 Product Focus
Our 2023 development efforts will focus on three key areas: Dotmatics Core, Tools, and Solutions. As shown in the image, we have adjusted some product names and solution groupings to facilitate a more intuitive and seamless user experience.
In 2023, updates within each area may include:
Dotmatics Core - Continued integration, user-experience improvements, and enhancements within data management, notebook, inventory, screening, and instrument integration.
Scientific Tools - Improved back-and-forth data flow between specialty tools and the core platform. Creation of capability sets that reflect the way users actually work, not the way features were historically delineated.
Dotmatics Solutions - Continued unification of capabilities, integrations, and workflows needed to address research challenges in biology, chemistry, and formulations.
Building a Better Future Together
Our customers make the world a better place by delivering breakthrough therapies, novel formulations, new materials, and sustainable foods. We’re helping them do this by getting their tools, data, and people working better together.
We Want to Hear from You
Whether you're a current customer or someone looking for a solution to your specific challenges, we welcome your thoughts on how we can best support your innovation.