content discoverability

Project:  Provide a means for physics researchers to efficiently determine if a scientific paper is relevant to their research interests

Role:  Client side UX lead, creative UX agency management lead, customer insights lead

Approach:  Leverage customer personas and journey maps revealing the significant amount of time spent by researchers culling through thousands of articles per year as triage to prioritize articles to read in-depth, with a goal of making that work activity more efficient

Key Considerations:  Scientific papers can be quite lengthy, but observed commonalities in structure can be used to index the content, enabling researchers to quickly assess an interest in an article; through contextual interviews researchers indicated a preference to first review the article 'FIGURES', and then within the full text the priority was 'ABSTRACT', 'INTRODUCTION', 'CONCLUSION', 'REFERENCES'.

Results:  Navigation elements to enhance discoverability applied to papers published on the core publishing platform

• KPI on discoverability UX update: User research studies showed article readability and usability was increased by 20%

Figures link in the primary sub-navigation bar

Link to article FIGURES prominently displayed

Side Navigation Anchor Links

Using the anchor link side navigation to display the ABSTRACT

Using the anchor link side navigation to display the INTRODUCTION

Using the anchor link side navigation to display the CONCLUSION

Using the anchor link side navigation to display the REFERENCES

SIDE NAVIGATION DESIGN SCHEME

The article sections noted in blue are consistent for all papers

The article sections noted in red are customizable per paper as needed