Platform
Website

Role
Research, UX and Content Strategy

Skills
Adobe CS (Photoshop, Illustrator, XD)
User Research
Wireframing
Prototyping

Overview

Alexander Street Press is an electronic academic database publisher. As a research library, Alexander Street Press has a unique offering with a large body of original and inspirational content. They provide citation and editing tools with a easily searchable tagging systems for academics and libraries. Although the research tools are promoted well on the landing page, this page does not convey the breadth and variety of their collections.

The Brief

Our opportunity was to refine the landing page to appeal to a broader base and increase memberships. The goal is to encourage users and visitors to take the next step: sign up, find if their current library offers access to the collection.

How can we appeal to a broader audience, float up more content and get visitors to join?

Research & Process

Stakeholder Interview

The stakeholder made it clear that they did not want a rebrand and wanted to maintain their current visual language. They are not interested in developing a separate mobile experience but would like the site to be responsive. Our biggest takeaway from our stakeholder meeting was the known issue that people simply are unaware that they have access to alexanderstreet.com through their institution.

User Research

We designed our research to discover people's viewing habits, video subscriptions and if the engage in educational programming and/or watch for self-improvement.

The methods we utilized inlcuded observations while completing tasks, interviews and asking participants to keep a video log for 2-3 days.

We gleaned the following insights:

• People felt that self-improvement was important but often did not act on it.
• People of strong preconceptions regarding functionality for search and video.
• Users are turned off by a registration requirement.
• People associate videos with unwinding and relaxing.

Personas

We developed two personas based exclusively on user research and a third based on another audience we felt would be a good fit for the product, an educated retiree.

Experience Map. We also created a simple experience map to help us identify pain points a visitor may have during the sign-up process at alexanderpress.com.

Developing Features

We developed our ideas to fit the needs of the user. Although the stakeholder is most interested in more sign-ups, we were interested in what would provide the user with a compelling reason to do it. We felt the answer to that was content, so although we knew we needed to provide a clear sign-up process, we focused on how we could position the content to create desire. This meant bringing up more content and using visuals.

We landed on the following MVPs:

• Smart Sign-Up
• Curated Lists
• Content Galleries

Cart-Sort

Building off of insights from our user sessions, we wanted to know more about how people associated different subjects and topics. This was important to our goal of being able to organize the content in an understandable format. We did an open and closed card-sort. To build our lists we pulled from video title on the site.

Results. Our results indicated that most of the features offered on the site are specific to research and not to the general public. The open sort confirmed our belief that much of the content is unfamiliar to users and they would need it to be curated in order to understand it. Just browsing the titles, people were not able to make connections between closely related subjects.

Designing a Structure

Rather than build a classic site map, we felt it would better serve our task to create a mind map of the landing page content. We have developed an organizing principle for the content with the three main areas:

1. Membership

2. Content

3. Research Tools and Resources

Competitive Analysis

We looked at the sign-in and content organization from several video and educational programming sites that we felt would be a competitor.

A few things we noticed worked well on these sites:

• A clear membership area in a consistent and expected place.
• Breaking down the sign-in process into easily digestible bits.
• Many sites we viewed bundle their content in different ways, such as, trending, top 10, and editor pick’s. They did not expect users to find them through only search or a category.

Wireframes & Prototypes

The wireframe needed to illustrate our hierarchy for the landing along with the new content features. To implement our features we leaned on early insights from research and the competitive analysis. Beginning with a paper prototype, we created a user test-worthy version in Adobe XD.

Smart Sign-Up. We began any sign-up process with [1] asking the user to check if they have access through an institution. This was in response to a known issue from the stakeholder.

If the user does not have access, the are taken through the flow of creating an account: [2] choosing a plan, [3] providing information, [4] setting up payment, and [5] logging into the site.

User Feedback

All of our users recognized the site as a video site with a subscription component. Although there were no images, the use of the video “play” icon was a clear signifier of the type of activity and content.

The sign-up process seemed to be a great success amongst are users with people clearly understanding the process. This was due to the fact that we used commonly accepting interaction patterns for these functions. The membership area was in an expected position, with common language and easy to locate.

Conclusion

Based on feedback we revised our designs and presented our insights. View our revised design.