MBUX Portfolio: Progressive Web App for Elsevier Journals

Project Overview

The web platform for Elsevier’s 650-plus health, medical and life science journals will be upgraded with an updated design, a more robust tool for editors, and a much-improved reading experience on mobile devices.

Editors currently spend a large amount of time maintaining websites, apps and other digital products with information that quickly becomes out of date. There was a need to try and reduce costs and maintenance overheads which would help them now and in the future.

To do this the JBS in-house team selected a Headless CMS to create a progressive web app to be used as a single source of information that will be dynamically distributed through to all its digital platforms. Having this single data source would reduce the amount of time taken to perform updates and ensure that data is consistent across all their platforms.

Project duration

May 2018 - August 2019 (16 months)

CMS Evaluations

The technical team evaluated over 80 CMS’ and they shortlisted 2 candidates.

I carried out an UX evaluation of the shortlisted candidate. I followed a set of criteria for content creating, content management, publishing and presentation.

A summary of findings of the technical team, business analysts and UX were presented to the Program board.

Content audit and requirements gathering

Having a good data source was critical for the projects' success. The first stage then was to take stock of what they had and perform an audit to assess whether it would be fit for purpose in the future. Working with the content editors we gathered all the content and compiled it into a spreadsheet sheet where a ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial) analysis was conducted. This gave us an idea of the job ahead for the content editors. I also spent time talking to key stakeholders in the organisation and the project business analysts to understand their information needs at present and in the future.

One of the biggest challenges was to try and shift peoples’ notions of how a traditional CMS works to how a headless CMS works. Using the content audit and the requirements we had gathered from the stakeholders we set about dissembling each page to its component parts. This was done as a group activity with the content editors and a content strategist as I was keen to get their help to establish the relationships between content but also to help them understand the new way in which content would be structured and get this thinking about how they write content for the new CMS.

Designing for content editors

Before content editors started using the CMS I designed all the CMS components that make up a journal site. This was a collaboratively effort with a content strategist, the project business analysts, the development team and the content editors.

I held weekly review sessions with the content editors and the product team to make sure that what I was designing matched their business and content requirements. I used an interactive whiteboard called Miro Board for these sessions to facilitate feedback and be shared with the team. There was a great deal of hidden complexity within the structure of the data and there were numerous iterations of the CMS components as we refined and edited the components.

Implementation

Key challenges

Design structured content to allow web editors to publish content.
Re-educate content producers into designing content for structured content instead of the traditional method of producing content for page templates.
Consolidate information from numerous information sources both digital and physical onto one platform.

Outcome

There was a gradual rollout. The new CMS will be launched with the first wave of journals in August 2019.