Feature


Tools of the trade


Five industry experts give Tim Gillett the low-down on user experience


How would you define the term ‘user experience’ in terms of scholarly publishing?


Giuliano Maciocci, eLife head of product and UX: With scholarly publishing being so diverse, the definition of user experience (UX) should encompass every touchpoint for every stakeholder, from the systems administrators running publishing platforms, to the authors, editors, reviewers and journal staffers that interact with these platforms on a daily basis.


Ebsco Information Services senior director of user experience and design, Jesse Blank: Successful support of scholarly communications requires us, as a community, to consider the larger research/ information needs that are driving their search behaviours, so that we can build our services to support the broad and diverse


range of scholars and students who rely on us not only for their grades or careers, but for the information that supports them in making an impact in the world.


Paula de Matos, consultant at The Pistoia Alliance: User experience is about making the tools available to researchers as effective as possible, in order to accelerate innovation. It involves deeply understanding users through research, organising information, visual design (and more), all with the goal of meeting user needs and doing it elegantly. Specifically, in the field of science, context is crucial to understand how users utilise a tool to solve the right problems for them and simplify product development – this includes everything from designing a button to be easily found, to integrating a new feature into their workflow. User experience is foundational to the pursuit of good science. Practicing UX in scholarly publishing will go a long way to ensuring that scientists can find, access and discover publications relevant to their field.


Giuliano Maciocci, eLife head of product and UX


Gaëlle Béquet, director, ISSN International Centre: From my perspective as an LIS researcher and as a librarian, the user experience is the set of perceptions and responses that result from the use of information systems offered by content providers and library discovery tools. As stated in the Library Reference Model developed under IFLA [International Federation of Library Associations] auspices, the user experience is the specific path that the researcher follows to find, identify, select, obtain and explore global information resources, notably those available online. This process consists of several steps with are critical to the success of the operation. The researcher brings together information about one or more resources of interest by searching on any relevant criteria: the simplicity of the search interface and the ability to query multiple databases simultaneously and seamlessly are paramount. He/she is able to understand the nature of the resources and select the most relevant to his/her purpose: quality metadata is required to complete these steps in an efficient way. The user can


8 Research Information December 2019/January 2020 Pistoia Alliance consultant Paula de Matos


then access the selected content and relate it to other contents that redirects research towards other topics of interest: the links established between diverse resources are absolutely vital for the content search process to become a virtuous circle.


Vee Rogacheva, UX designer at OpenAthens: In scholarly publishing UX is the interaction of learners, researchers, faculty staff and librarians with the ecosystem of tools and services they use to navigate to required digital resources and to achieve their goals.


Please describe the work that your organisation is doing in terms of user experience


Maciocci, eLife: eLife has a strong user- centered design focus for everything it produces, from how a research article appears on its website to how its open- source Libero publishing platform is deployed. We incorporate UX research, design and testing into almost every aspect of our activities that is exposed to end users, and have built a talented product and UX team to ensure that process is constantly evolving. Most importantly, we have worked hard to ensure that key


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32