The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) recently partnered with the STRUDEL team to host an exciting open source Contributor Workshop at the AI Futures Lab in downtown Berkeley. Bringing together over 30 engineers and scholars, the event embraced a hands-on approach to building open source user experience (UX) resources. Participants brought the room to life in parallel working sessions designed to foster a wide range of contributions from curriculum enhancements to design templates and code.
STRUDEL is an open source project generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The project is an effort dedicated to building and stewarding community, products, and resources that enable more usable scientific software experiences. By advocating for and advancing the inclusion of user experience (UX) in scientific tools, the STRUDEL community is actively working to bridge the gap between complex science needs and intuitively designed research software systems.
Aaron Culich (UCB) and Rajshree Deshmukh (LBNL) fostering discussion during a group discussion.
Accelerating Science through Open Source Collaboration
Bridging the gap between scientific needs and usable software isn’t something that can happen in isolation. While the project was originally founded by members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Scientific Data Division UX staff, it has since grown into a collaborative effort with partners from Superbloom Design, 2i2c, The Carpentries, and BIDS. Collectively the project team aims to innovate tools that accelerate scientific discovery. This strong reliance on partnership is what makes the project so impactful. As Design and Outreach Engineer, Mary Goldman pointed out during the event, it is incredibly motivating to be in a room full of peers who care about the same mission. This is particularly meaningful as all too often UX practitioners in science work as individuals or in small teams.
Kirstie Whitaker, Executive Director of BIDS, captured this community’s collaborative spirit during her presentation, “Contributing to Scientific Open Source Software”. Developing from Ben Jame’s concept “Meaning Matrix”, she illustrated that while consuming or creating alone has its place, true meaning is found in creating together – especially by contributing to open source.
Kirstie Whitaker speaking to attendees during her presentation.
Developing Usable Features Across Three Pathways
Driven by the collaborative mindset, the core goal of the workshop was to actively contribute to open source science via user experience, user interfaces, and design resources. The STRUDEL team organized three main pathways for attendees to contribute to: design, code, and curriculum. The design group dove into collaboratively generating new concepts and designs to expand the existing STRUDEL Task Flows. Task Flows are core design templates that make it easier for scientific software developers to visualize research and build interfaces. Contributors in the coding group made progress on backend architecture strategy and pushed new updates for documentation migration.
Mary Goldman, Hannah Cohoon, and Kirstie Whitaker discussing in a group
Over in the curriculum pathway, the group made incredible progress in enhancing the Rapid User Testing lesson. They tackled a fundamental challenge: shifting from just providing resources to people who already value UX, to figuring out how to reach scientific developers who don’t realize they need those resources yet.
Participants working together on their laptops during a collaborative workshop session.
Stewarding a Sustainable Home for Open Source Innovation
The amount of progress made across all three pathways was a powerful reminder of what makes open source collaboration so meaningful. A massive thank you goes out to every participant and the STRUDEL Team.
For us at BIDS, it is a true pleasure to help empower these open source connections and facilitate a space where community driven innovation can thrive. Lavanya Ramakrishnan, STRUDEL Principal Investigator, closed the event by highlighting the value of BIDS continued partnership with such open source projects: “We are so grateful to BIDS for serving as the project’s home and actively fostering the collaborative environment that makes this open source work possible.”
Lavanya Ramakrishnan giving a closing speech to attendees.
The work doesn’t stop here, as the STRUDEL community continues to expand its resources and reach. To learn more and contribute to STRUDEL visit their website, LinkedIn, or GitHub. Looking for a scientific UX community? Check out the US-RSE UX working group where STRUDEL members actively contribute. To stay in touch with the BIDS community and join the conversation, please follow us on Bluesky & LinkedIn and subscribe to the BIDS newsletter.