Summary
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization and one of the most popular online academic journal search engines used by thousands of institutions across the world. While an intern at JSTOR, I created conceptual designs for their then unreleased online books and primary source offerings. I also designed and conducted an internal ethnography study and a series of usability experiments with actual users.
Digital Books and Primary Sources
While I worked at ITHAKA, plans to launch digital academic books on their platform were still in the early stages. I started by conducting a competitive analysis on current eBook content providers to get insight into how the digital book landscape was like at the time. Soon after, I began interviewing users of the service for their opinion on searching academic books via JSTOR.
In addition, JSTOR was planning to launch primary source material on the platform. I was the primary UX resource tasked to provide recommendations on presenting these primary source documents.
The challenge was unique in that JSTOR’s academic clientele prefer to heavily interact with their reading materials by underlining, highlighting, writing notes etc. Current implementations do not support this type of workflow very well and I sought out a way that could capture the essence of reading academic books. I was inspired by one user interview, a literature student that let us take pictures of her favorite poetry book. I noticed how she had a method, strange markings had a meaning to her, a folded page was more than just a bookmark, and an underline was not the same as a highlight.
Internal Ethnography Study
The JSTOR UX and Marketing teams work closely but have different project management practices. While at JSTOR, I was asked to conduct a short internal study to figure out how the two team can work more efficiently together.
I interviewed members of the UX and Marketing teams to understand the differences in their day-to-day habits. I created a tree diagram to help boil down main points and concerns. I took it a step further and organized these comments with an affinity diagram using sticky notes. As a result, I was able to fine areas of communication both teams could easily utilize without disrupting their own internal workflows.
Usability Studies
I was in charge of recruiting and testing participants for then-unreleased features. This included a new recommender system and a new interface for MyJSTOR, a feature for users to manage their account as well as their saved articles/searches.
Participants were invited to the office where they consented to a video, audio and screen recordings. Afterwards, I analyzed their data alongside another colleague in order rot identify areas in our software that have improved or need improvement.