Turning a research prototype into an instrument a lab can run.

Pyxa has two users with opposite needs: a scientist who understands the assay end to end, and a technician who runs it for a customer and doesn't. We made a guided, guard-railed path the default, and added an Advanced mode that lets expert users skip the checks they don't need. A third mode, Demo, runs the product on a single touchscreen at conferences. One product serves all three without compromising any of them.

The original sequence committed expensive reagents before confirming the sample was viable, so a failed prep wasted thousands of dollars and an irreplaceable sample. We reordered the flow: the instrument runs a quick scan and confirms signal before it ever asks the operator to thaw reagents. Failure now happens early, when it costs nothing.

A spatial multi-omics run holds far more complexity than any single step requires. We built the interface around progressive disclosure, picture-based, step-by-step guidance and minimal text entry, since there's no keyboard, with depth one layer down. The operator sees only the decisions that matter now; everything else stays out of the way until it's needed.

Long, asynchronous operations and physical states can't be faked, and an action taken out of order can damage the instrument or ruin a run. We made many screens non-interactive status surfaces that reflect real hardware state, and built the workflows to catch out-of-order actions, explain them plainly, and roll back safely. The operator is never left guessing what the machine is doing, or stuck.