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V. is a postdoc working at a Biology lab at MIT that requires a lot of data processing support. V. herself does not do any computational work, although often solicits the help of computer scientists computational biologists in analyzing her data.
V. is relatively satisfied with her interactions with the computer scientists, although she mentions that efficient communication is important because the computer scientist computational biologist she works with needs to understand exactly what biological questions she is interested in. Where possible, V. uses workflows such as Galaxy (a software for performing basic computational biology tasks such as finding the intersection of two sets of regions). She mentions it is also sometimes difficult to wait until a computer scientist computational biologist is free to do the work for her, as the available computer scientists are often oversubscribed. When asked if she often needs the computer scientist computational biologist to perform similar tasks repeatedly, or to perform permutations of the same tasks, she said yes and agreed that it would be nice if she could perform the various permutations of a task herself rather than soliciting the help of a computer scientist computational biologist each time.
When asked if there were other problems she encounters in her day-to-day life, she said that it is difficult to keep track of the various permutations of an experimental protocol that exist, and wished for a centralized way of knowing what people have tried in the past and what worked. For instance, she is currently working on a protocol for chromatin fractionation and is trying to gather as much information about it as she can. When we asked if we could see how she went about gathering information about a protocol, she revealed a large stack of papers and spent considerable time navigating it to find her desired paper, which was the experimental protocol published by the Young Lab. She then pulled up another set of papers which had the protocol that she had obtained from talking to the Young Lab directly. The latter protocol had several handwritten annotations and was messy to read, but also contained substantially more detail than the official published protocol. Photographs of the two papers side by side are included below: 
V also mentioned that even within the lab, variations of a protocol (eg: for chromatin immunoprecipitation) exist for different antibodies and conditions, and the only way to gather all the necessary information is to go talking to people which is inefficient. Other members in the lab who were present seconded this opinion. A quick look at the lab notebooks revealed that Biologists would copy protocols into their lab notebook even though they are present on the lab’s online wiki in order to make annotations like the one shown below (“JW” is another member of the lab): 
Furthermore, in optimizing an experimental procedure, biologists also keep track of their previous attempts and their mistakes, so that they know what worked and what did not. Very often biologists will commit an error in a step and will proceed with the protocol anyway, as it is a learning experience in how sensitive individual steps in the protocol are. An example of such an annotation is shown below: 
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S is a graduate student in the Biology department at MIT and needs to do biological data processing for her research. She needs to run big computational jobs on the lab’s cluster occasionally. She often notes down the required commands and parameters for a program she needs to run, in EverNote (A free note taking software for macbook users), so that she can copy paste them later. But, she often forgets where she has put her notes and also finds it difficult to search and find the location of the input files on the server if she needs to do the same analysis again. When she can’t locate her notes about the required commands, she looks at the help file in the command line but does not find it very helpful since it has a lot of text and she is only interested in finding how to run the program. She feels that, it would be easier for her to do data analysis if she could just fill the some boxes with the parameters and select the command to run. She would also want to see examples, caveats and history of her previous selections.
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X. is currently primarily a computational biologist, but has a background in lab-bench biology. He has performed experiments before and is familiar with the needs of wet-lab -bench biologists, but he himself rarely performs experiments at present (but will in the future).
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