Bluefors builds cryogenic products used in developing quantum computers and world-changing research.
Our work with Bluefors has included collaborating on UX/UI design, as well as front & back-end development for their ultra-low temperature measurement systems. The co-operation has been a combination of making sure the user experience aids the various user groups focus in their challenging work, and meets the high technical standards of the science world.
Client
Bluefors
Industry
Cryogenic measurement systems
Platform
Control units, Web
Services
Service Design, UX/UI Design, Software Development
Technologies
Typescript, React, Material UI, Redux, StompJS, Java, Spring, YAML
The applications for Bluefors' dilution refrigerator measurement systems are numerous – ranging from quantum computing to research on new medicine. Similarly, their user experience needs to accommodate different types of users.
We started the project with a series of interviews to understand these segments better, talking to test engineers, scientists, researchers – as well as Bluefors' own sales and management teams. Based on this, we formed an understanding of how the interfaces could best serve their audience by letting them focus on the work itself rather than navigating complex menus.
The user interviews revealed that while the user interface of the measurement devices needed to have a great number of features, most users did not need all of them. Our approach was to present the simplest layers first to ensure that the basic functionalities would always be easily available.
In its default mode, the device runs automatically. Should the user need to drive the refrigerator manually, they can do so by enabling different modes in the submenus. For analysation, we created a data viewer with various options for visualising the results. Additionally, a built-in production diary helps in keeping track of the research projects.
The key for a successful technical implementation was finding the best ways to display the complex information that the system outputs in a way that would remain easy to maintain and update in the future.
We created a React component compiler that works together with Bluefors' system configuration and predefined set of components, resulting in an interactive system diagram. We also extended and improved an open source graphing library to bring the data viewer into the application. The result displays all the essential information about the system's state at any given point in time.
For back-end, we implemented a system enabling Cryo-Engineers to implement the state machines controlling the cryostat in Python, with the ability to work either inside or outside of the control software.
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