{"id":1455,"date":"2020-04-01T01:32:24","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T23:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.neovita.com\/thoughts\/?p=1455"},"modified":"2020-04-07T05:00:19","modified_gmt":"2020-04-07T03:00:19","slug":"experience-vision-springer-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oninteractions.com\/thoughts\/experience-vision-springer-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Experience vision: Springer Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Springer Nature sites the Librarian channel<\/a>, the\u00a0Librarian \u00a0portal<\/a>, and the Metadata\u00a0downloader<\/a> will be a family of efficient application tools and info sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Springer Nature and my role<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Springer Nature<\/a> (“SN”) is the world’s second largest academic publisher. We curate and promote research output in a wide range of subjects, as journal articles, books and databases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our main business model is to license published content to academic institutions and companies. Librarians (sometimes called information specialists) are responsible for finding, licensing, and making content available to patrons (students, researchers, and other colleagues).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2017 I have been doing product design in a team that provide self-service tools to librarians. I also advice our marketing team on the librarian content they publish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started at SN I felt a need to deeply understand librarians since I base my work on a human-centered philosophy<\/a>,. How else would I be able to help them become better at what they do? Very little knowledge about librarians existed in the SN IT organization, so I used 50+ interviews, blogs, mailing lists (!), and conversations with my colleagues outside the IT department to understand libraries and librarians. I still learn new things every week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it bad that our sites look so individual?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

My colleague Jo, product manager in the team, had a thesis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Some librarian tasks require the librarian to use several SN sites to get their work done.<\/li>
  2. Since the sites look completely differently the librarians feel disoriented.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I conducted 9 research sessions to investigate Jo’s thesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It turns out that Jo was correct in that some tasks require the librarian to travel across several sites. However, none of the librarians who managed to complete tasks that needed cross-site journeys seemed to be deterred by the difference in visual languages. Jennifer even said the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Jennifer, one of the librarians I spoke to<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    The birth of a vision<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    While the answer to our initial question was No, I got other insights from the research. Together with my existing knowledge, a new vision for our sites emerged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Librarian channel, Librarian portal, and Metadata downloader are a family<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    The first part of the vision is about the connections between some of our sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Insight: Content, footer and main navigation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    When trying to complete the tasks most focus was on the content of each \u201cpage\u201d. Links in content would be followed if the information scent<\/a> was \u201cstrong\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The main navigation is of course also used to find the bigger areas of a site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    However, if no link was found in the content, the footer was often used to navigate to a place that might be correct \u2013 the word \u201clibrarian\u201d has strong info scent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    What\u2019s interesting here is that both in the footer and in content it\u2019s completely OK to link to a different site. That\u2019s an opportunity for us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Insight: Tasks, roles, and persons in the library<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Tasks can be mapped to roles in the library:<\/p>\n\n\n\n