Content delivery FEATURE
A different design
The relentless rise of mobile device use in scholarly publishing is triggering platform developers to review website design, says Rebecca Pool
J
ust over three years ago, US-based JSTOR overhauled its user interface to make life easier for mobile users. From here on in, the content of the digital library’s website would adapt to
the screen size of a user’s device automatically. So, rather than wireless device users being re- directed to a separate website to access content, all JSTOR patrons would see the same site, but information would now be reflowed, moved or hidden depending on his or her screen-size. Responsive web design had reached scholarly publishing.
Myriad scholarly publishers have followed suit. Elsevier, Wiley and more have turned to so-called responsive design to ease mobile use on websites, and the trend looks set to continue. UK-based Semantico supplies digital publishing software to scholarly publishers, and has been an advocate of responsive design from the word go. Owen Priestley, head of design
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and user experience at the company, was hired nearly three years ago to develop digital designs and has noted the growing need of publishers to accommodate users on a variety of devices, especially smartphones. ‘We’re in such a shifting-sands, fragmented digital landscape in which things move so fast and it’s hard to predict the future,’ he highlights. ‘But we’ve been watching mobile usage rise slowly and steadily, felt a desire to future-proof our content platform, and very early on there was a desire in our business to use responsive design in our websites.’ A case-in-point is Bloomsbury Academic’s Drama Online Library, a collaboration between the publisher and Faber & Faber to produce an online library of the most studied, performed and critically acclaimed plays from the last
Responsive design hinges on the ‘media query’
two millennia. Semantico was tasked with developing the product, keeping in mind that users, such as drama practitioners, could be accessing the website on mobile devices. ‘Bloomsbury had recognised that they wanted this to be at least working on iPads and tablets,’ explains Priestley. ‘The client didn’t have any hard stats but had anecdotal evidence for a need for this.’
Given this, Priestley and colleagues delivered a website with responsive design elements, based on the company’s Scolaris content platform, and including various interactive tools, notes and annotations. Access
management was controlled by Semantico’s access and authentication system, SAMS. The online library launched in May 2013, and has since won an ALPSP ‘highly commended’ award for publishing innovation. ‘Thanks to its design, the front-end of our Scolaris platform is very malleable and we’ve been able to convert it easily to different formats,’ explains Priestley. ‘For example, it’s been quite straightforward for us to add responsive frameworks so the design fluidly scales between different-sized screens.’ Taking responsive design a step further, earlier this year, Semantico delivered Wiley’s Royal Marsden Manual of Clinical Nursing Procedures website. This fully-responsive design website is used by nurses to deliver quick answers to questions, be they in waiting rooms, on a ward or in accident and emergency departments.
Clearly a fully-responsive design website delivered the goods this time, but today, the lion’s share of Semantico’s current websites include responsive elements alongside features from a well-established and, some might say, rival design method – adaptive design. So what’s the difference and why use both?
Competing frameworks Responsive design hinges on the ‘media query’, which became a W3C recommended standard in June 2012. These query features are built into the latest style sheet language, CSS3, which describes the webpage presentation, and determine the size of a user’s device from the browser.
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