While employed with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office (now part of MPublishing) as an interface specialist during 2009 and 2010, I took on the challenge of overhauling the look and feel of the group’s online offerings. MPublishing is dedicated to publishing new and re-issued scholarly work, online and in print. SPO’s focus was and is digital-first, open-access scholarly books and journals. My goal was to take the first steps to bring the appearance and UX of SPO’s content up to speed with contemporary standards in accessibility, look and feel, and interaction.
Read on for more information on the project, or skip directly to the artifact gallery.
Proposal
To gain buy-in from my colleagues for the experiment, I wrote a UX redesign proposal focusing on SPO’s flagship publication, the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), making recommendations based on usage, competitive analysis, and best practices. The proposal was well-received, and I began the process of finessing wireframes, prototyping pages, and mapping templates for the group’s publishing platform, a digital library product called DLXS that had been homegrown at the University of Michigan Libraries in the mid 1990s.
I had previous spent time updating those templates to bring DLXS’s output in line with accessibility and web standards, improving the ability of our readers to interact with the content, as well as to find it in search engines. This was part of my overarching project to improve the findability, accessibility, and user experience of SPO’s publications.
Download a PDF copy of the proposal.
Wireframes
During the proposal process, I developed wireframes to illustrate recommendations for particular pieces of functionality. I fleshed out these wireframes to lay the groundwork for prioritizing features and functionality. Conversations with colleagues and users solidified the v1.0 feature set that would be implemented in prototypes.
Design and Prototyping
My initial design was deemed too drastic a change for the audience by my colleagues, and we ended up with a very low-fi, flexible layout that I tested informally with colleagues, clients, and students.
Deployment
Templates based on my recommendations are currently in use for article and archive pages of JEP. The journal can be viewed at journalofelectronicpublishing.org.
Artifacts
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- User traffic diagram
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- Search limiters
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- Search results
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- Article-level search results
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- Individual articles
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- Easy citation linking
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- Quote support
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- Text first prototyping
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- Prototype for scans
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- Current look and feel