FEATURE New content types
in details, metadata details, or sections of the content that they are going to use as learning or teaching moments; a lean-forward experience, where you’re diving into the material.
‘So our player technologies, for example,
can’t be simple play buttons they have to be interactive apps in their own right, and that’s why we develop things like synchronised transcripts, and clip making capabilities, annotation capabilities, and playlisting is very important.’
Creating such lean-forward experiences can be complicated by the wide range of users, as well as places and devices on which they want to access content.
As Sedgwick puts it: ‘It’s a complex world.
We have so many different users: librarians, undergrads, post-grads, faculty, advanced
‘How can discoverability extend to related content on other publisher’s platform?’
researchers, and practitioners. Users want what they want where they want it and our content needs to be devise agnostic, working on a range of devises from mobiles through to desktops and all of the various tablets in between. ‘For example, there’s even more we could be doing to think more closely about the reading experience on mobile, it works better for some content types than others right now: for consumers engaging with video content it’s great, but it’s still challenging when you think about how academics want to consume chapters and books.
‘We are also thinking more about providing personalised experiences, giving the individual what they want, what is going to be relevant to them. Whether it’s more related content, or features on the page, like scrolling transcripts or clipping functionality, or, enabling the comparison of different data sets in one really easy workspace.
‘Publishers’ sites have traditionally provided a poor user experience as the rest of the world has moved on. Web design as a discipline is a really interesting thing to look at as publishers are expanding their online offerings, because it’s still very new. Things that new web companies would have by default are still quite new to publishers: designers, user experience designers, web analysts, a whole spectrum of roles and teams focused on that web experience. When major redesigns are rolled out we’re seeing much better sites, but there’s still more for publishers to do.’
Ciuffetti also sees much more to do: ‘There’s more to do with the persons involved and the material, the way community interacts with material and each other; allowing them to share stuff they’ve contributed or use stuff other people have put together. The lean-forward experience is also not something we’ve done all that’s possible or desired, especially with synchronised media.
‘For example, we have audio material for classical material, where we also have the score of that material, videos of orchestras performing that material, and reference material discussing that material. They’re all discoverable in their own way but I think what we expect is some synchronisation between that material so that they can experience it all working together. ‘We also have to ask ourselves, how is it
Martha Sedgwick, of Sage
we’re trying to fit into the overall ecosystem? It’s not just what the experience is of the users who arrive, but how does it connect up with what’s going on out there – the development of APIs, making it possible for people to put their own user experiences on top of our content, the ability to ingest content, and have it participate in the overall user experience.’
Conclusion
That some publishing platforms require more work on the user experience will come as little surprise; most researchers will have been subjected to a particularly excruciating publishing platform at some point, if not on a daily basis. But with new generations of publishing platforms focusing on discoverability and user experience, we are finally beginning to see glimpses of the real potential of the web as a scholarly publishing platform.
There is still much to do, and many challenges to overcome: How can a rich lean- forward experience be built for a mobile phone or a tablet? How can discoverability extend to related content on other publisher’s platform? There are no simple, one-size-fits-all solutions, but the increasingly competitive space is driving innovation, and those publishers who innovate successfully in the development of new platforms will continue to underline the importance of publishers to the scholarly information ecosystem.
46 Research Information OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 @researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
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