Journals Future Discovery
Project Overview
The JBS Future Discovery Project is a design-driven exploration of Elsevier's top-tier journals (The Cell, The Lancet, top society journals), to establish a future state vision three years from now.
The project involved learning from past work, extending that with further research, then translating our learnings to ideas through service and user experience based approaches to make tangible what these future experiences might look like and what it means within Elsevier and the diverse audiences served through the business' premium journal offering.
Deliverables
This work involved stakeholder interviews, user and competitor research, survey design, ideation, re-engineering the information architecture and prototyping and testing new design concepts
Project Duration
5 months (Jan-May 2018)
Immersion
As with most large projects I undertake the first stage was to immerse myself in the subject and find out as much about the domain and audience experience as I can.
User Research tracker
I created a tracker using Airtable and gathered all existing information and knowledge on the business, the products, the problem and most importantly the users. I uncovered existing research done within the business and reviewed analysis of competitors.
Survey and analytics research
Before starting with qualitative research I did some quantitative studies on the existing journal websites (Surveys and analytics research).
I run a number of web surveys to clarify our understanding of the user goals for visiting Elseviers premium journal sites.
As these websites have a high traffic we collected 460 responses in 2 days.The results of the surveys fleshed out some of the findings I had read about in the previous research and also unearthed new areas we had not considered in great detail.
Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Market Context
In parallel to the quantitative studies, I also carried out market and competitor research. I was interested to find out more about our competitors, trends and industry insights.
Stakeholder interviews
Once the initial user and market place research had been completed the next step was to talk to the various stakeholders to find out more about their needs and expectations for the new websites.
Another UX colleague and I had a series of one to one and group workshop exercises where we went into depth about this and it was interesting to hear some agreement about certain aspects of the website but also the conflicting ideas within the company about how to take it forward. We interviewed a total of 35 stakeholders.
User Research
I really wanted to explore more about how these top-tier journals were being used in reality by its intended audiences to uncover potential opportunities for the product platform.
The methodology I followed was a mixed-method approach integrating qualitative and quantitative of methods to obtain a fuller picture and better understanding of the business journals offering and its end-users. I planned a series of user research studies (contextual interviews, in-person and remote (moderated and unmoderated), usability testing sessions and card sort activities.
The first round of interviews was based on a topic guide that covered 4 areas answering the following research questions:
- Use of top-tier journals
- Use of mobile devices for work
- How do journals users search and browse for information?
- Competitors: What are the pros and cons of competitors products
- Do the information architecture support users to find relevant content?
