UX Design
INTOSH
CASE STUDY
Goal
To design a sharing application allowing users of academic libraries to reach research papers from a global library network, in a free, legal and fair way.
Design Process
Research
Research Plan
Persona
Affinity Diagram
Information Architecture
Research Plan
Workshops
Research Debrief
Interaction Design
Responsive Wireframes
Mid Fidelity Prototype
User Interface Design
Usability testing
Branding and UI basics
Usability Testing
Remote Testing
In-person Prototype Testing
Overview
THE PROBLEM: today, students and researchers have a restricted access to scientific e-resources. Indeed, they can only access the collection from their assigned university library. For this reason, getting hold of an article from an external entity gets slow and complicated, or expensive, this encourages illegal downloading.
THE MISSION: INTOSH’s mission is to make science world more open. Helping students and researchers acquire any research papers easily. Whatever article is needed, it should be accessible in a fair way in accordance to publishers’ property rights.
THE PRINCIPLE: INTOSH knows where the required article is available for free. By using a global library network, it makes sure to quickly provide a legal download link.
Research
The goal of the research was to understand how we can help students acquire articles quickly, avoiding them to visit illegal sources. No such platform exist today for digital scientific medias. Primary research was conducted based on similar digital services but also physical book sharing platforms. The sharing feature as well as the workarounds were researched along with discussions. Results from analysis were used to create an affinity diagram, aiming to understand 1/the complex global operations and organisation of global research articles. 2/ Why users may not be blocked to acquiring articles legally and 3/what can be done to encourage it.
In the scenario that users will prefer legal acquirements, understanding their motivation helped to fine-tune the needed features, increase the number of users and create an intuitive sharing experience.
Research Process
The secondary research led to the creation of a user persona.
” I had no idea that I could get access to external research papers”
The creation of Nicolas Kyros helped to create an empathy map.
To understand what type of workarounds users could come up with, we did a customer journey map
Thanks to the map, user’s motivation can be identified in details, which validated an initial assumption: users are more likely to use a service integrated to their own library website.
The results obtained from the customer journey map, research and analysis where used to define more scenarios, and the need of prioritization: “Which scenarios are the most common?”; “What feature should be integrated and what not?“
During the research stage, the biggest pain points appeared to be the lead-time to get an article. “Today, people can’t wait…”. Although INTOSH being fully online, the sharing action itself relies on a university librarian, a real person. But okay, yet librarian’s mission is to deliver knowledge and perpetuate the values around it.
Information Architecture
With the help of User flow diagrams, scenarios were organised. By testing low fidelity prototypes, we validated 3 scenarios. 1/Student starts from a library’s discovery system. 2/Starts with a DOI article reference number. 3/ Searches the article manually through the INTOSH’s interface.
Interaction Design
The Research and User Flow led to create a Wireframe flow. A chart covering all possible user’s interactions for the 3 different scenarios.
User Interface Design
Wireframes were combined with fresh and minimalistic branding guidelines to create a Medium fidelity prototype in FIGMA. All three scenarios and the full flows were prototyped and tested.