Analysis and news
scrum process, so we expect even more improvements in the future. The new technical infrastructure, built
by our platform team of De Gruyter and 67 Bricks developers, delivers each of our roughly 10 million product pages in 2.8 seconds on average, in comparison to 14 seconds on our old platform, so this problem was already greatly improved at launch. We continue to monitor our Core Web Vitals and adjust to improve this wherever we can.
Simple, clear and readable Clearly structured typographic hierarchy, nothing that distracts from a user’s goal, and calls-to-action that pull a user’s attention aren’t the sexiest UX topics, but experience and numerous studies (for example, Nielsen Norman Group) show that getting these things right helps users quickly find what they’re looking for. Reviewing the state of the site in the beta, we have iteratively refined the typography, removed little used, distracting buttons, emphasised important calls-to-action and clarified the visual hierarchy of pages continually, with changes deployed every month since we launched, and will continue to do so. Although most visitors arrive from a
search engine and land on a single product page, we’ve identified some users – for example, authors interested in publishing with us, librarians curious about what we offer, and researchers keeping up with new publications in their discipline – who need a more general way to browse our huge product catalogue. Our first step for this was to relaunch the homepage of our site, providing a two-level subject navigation, and lists of the newest and most popular products, dynamically generated based on publication and usage data. We also worked on more comprehensive dynamic pages of new and popular products, focusing more on specific product type and discipline combinations, such as new architecture books or popular open access products on linguistics. These pages were deployed at the end of last year. The placeholder, search-focused homepage at launch in February 2021. The newer, browsing-oriented homepage deployed a few months after launch.
Evaluating impact Our primary business model is B2B: we sell our products to institutional libraries, and provide access on our site to their professors, students and researchers. If these users are happy, our customers – librarians – are also happy. So, again, one of our main ways to judge the effectiveness
24 Research Information Spring 2022 @researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
“No website is ever ‘done’, but we’re pleased with where it’s going”
of our UX improvements is customer service tickets, and what features they relate to. Since launch, overall ticket numbers have dropped almost 20 per cent, access-related tickets far further, and our new webshop has generated almost no tickets at all, despite very active sales. Our secondary business model is B2C:
selling our products directly to users on our own site, and through third-parties like Amazon. Our new webshop, launched this summer, has already generated double the revenue of the shop on our old site. Next year we’ll begin a comprehensive usability review of the webshop, with the primary goals of increasing time on site, number of pages viewed and online sales.
How is the UX approach being adopted across the company? This is a long road, and we’ve admittedly only begun walking it. We’ve primarily approached this through education, and establishment of cross-disciplinary channels of communication. User experience is a foreign concept
for most people, so we’ve been holding regular company-wide ‘UX 101’ presentations to explain how we work, and why it’s good for De Gruyter and our users and customers. Longer term, once UX is a familiar idea, we aim to begin coaching colleagues in other departments on how they could integrate UX thinking and methods into their own work.
Beyond that, we’ve striven for open
communication with colleagues in our customer service, sales, production, marketing and editorial departments. By integrating them into our concept development, using them for testing of our ideas and prototypes, and gathering their unique perspectives on their contact with, and feedback from, our users and customers, we’ve learned a great deal, and they have begun to see UX methods as a normal part of day-to-day work.
What are your future plans for user research? Our most urgent plan for user research is to hire a user researcher, hopefully early next year. As already mentioned, our small team doesn’t have the time for the thorough, constant user research we’d like to do, and we currently depend on data from Hotjar, Google Analytics and customer service to help us define goals and evaluate our development. Starting in the first half of this year, with the help of our new user researcher, we plan to conduct bi-monthly usability reviews with external users and focus groups with librarians, implement the infrastructure for A/B testing to evaluate how new ideas perform, conduct further, more focused interviews to identify user needs and opportunities to better serve them, and a complete usability review and refinement of our webshop. No website is ever ‘done’, but we’re
pleased with where it’s going and we are honoured our commitment has been recognised by OpenAthens.
Matt Balara is senior manager for UX design at De Gruyter
Shutterstock.com
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 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
