Analysis and news
UX – putting the user first Matt Balara explains how an established publisher, De Gruyter, completed an extraordinary transformation
How did your UX journey take off? At OpenAthens’ 2022 AccessLab event, De Gruyter was announced as the winner of the third annual Best Publisher User Experience (UX) Award 2022. When 2020 began, De Gruyter had a
site running on a third-party system, only a few internal developers, and no UX team or strategy. In February 2021 we had a new director of UX design, a well staffed internal development team collaborating closely with our partner 67 Bricks, and we launched a completely new
degruyter.com, largely based on user feedback from a two-month beta period. Since launch we’ve been iteratively learning about our users, evaluating UX performance, defining our goals and updating the site in an agile scrum process. We looked at our site and users through the lenses of data analysis and human behaviour.
User interviews To understand our users, we conducted one-to-one, hour-long interviews with 10 librarians and 10 researchers in five different countries and a variety of disciplines, focused on the basic question: ‘How do you do what you do?’ The zoom interviews included a great deal of context – where they work, what their jobs entail, what tools they use, how the pandemic has changed their work – as well as screen sharing to observe how they perform their daily tasks, navigate our site and others, how they organise their files, how they work with email, Excel and other software, and the day-to-day problems they have.
Analysing the recorded interviews
gave us a good list of commonalities and differences between user groups, primary tasks we could help them with, and frustrations we could alleviate.
Data analysis For a quantitative perspective, we took the Google Analytics data and the feedback we’d received during the beta, as well as the database of customer service
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requests from the last year, and combed through them to identify user behaviours and complaints, and the most common problems we could solve to provide the most user impact possible. Customer service tickets and specific analytics metrics also form our ongoing UX KPIs for the future. The interviews, data analysis, and beta
feedback defined the majority of our scrum backlog.
What does the development process look like? Our process is quite streamlined: quick and dirty wireframes define an idea and basic interaction, more detailed screen design defines the look, and interactive prototypes nail down detailed interaction, and demonstrate how it feels in use. With a UX team of only two people, we
realised it was impossible to keep up a time-consuming usability testing process, and decided on a data-driven UX strategy for 2021, until we’re able to hire a UX researcher. We conduct reviews of our Hotjar data – heatmaps and recordings of mouse movement and clicks – and
“Interviews focused on the basic question: How do you do what you do?”
Google Analytics every two-week sprint, to understand what users are doing on the site, and how our changes have affected them. One good example of tangible results
from this approach was noticing a large number of users ‘rage clicking’ on DOIs (repeated quick clicks are a clear indicator of frustrated expectations). DOIs are required to be links by the DOI guidelines, but link to the page the user is already looking at, therefore clicks do nothing. After identifying the problem and creating a ticket in our backlog, DOIs were styled to not look like links in the next sprint, and rage DOI clicks all but disappeared. A
simple, quick solution that removed a great deal of user frustration.
How about user feedback? As mentioned above, our small team is unable to manage constant user recruiting, scheduling and testing, so we’ve made do: while they’re not users per se, a large number of our colleagues were librarians, researchers, authors and professors before joining De Gruyter, so integrating them and our developers into concept discussions and prototype testing sessions is an invaluable part of our process.
Applying a lean, ‘Don’t Make Me Think’
approach, running short tests with three to five users, has quickly generated changes to either our design in progress, or the already deployed interface, with simple improvement tickets usually implemented in the next sprint.
Where have you improved? Our partnerships with LibLynx and PSI have greatly improved user access to content, as shown by a dramatic drop in access-related customer service tickets since launch, and our statistics on authenticated vs unauthenticated users on the site. However our user interviews demonstrated what a confusing mess authentication is to most of them, and many users still ask, ‘Am I authenticated? How am I authenticated? Do I have access to this?’
Until more fundamental interface
solutions were possible, we came up with three ideas: • The ‘How access works’ page, which explains in simple language how to get authenticated, and dynamically displays the user’s current authentication status. This page is currently the second most- viewed page on our site, with an average time on page of over one minute. We’ve also received unsolicited user feedback thanking us for the clear explanation.
• A user’s authentication status is always displayed at the top of every page in a slim banner: green for authenticated, with details on how they’re authenticated, and yellow for unauthenticated. Both
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