Publishing platform redesign—the journey continues

Last year, we engaged the innovation consultancy Modern Human to help us set a clearer vision for our publishing site. We made some preparatory changes to the design and brand before optimising our backend system to make our development time shorter. Find out more about how we involved users with our initial designs.

Following on the good work we’ve done, this year, we aim to improve key user journeys for journals and books. We have noticed that the number of our mobile users is growing, in order to help researchers on the go, we are making all the new pages responsive, so our content can be accessed easily on mobile devices.

Speed is a key element for our users. Among all the user testing we’ve done so far, the common theme is that users want a fast site, especially when it comes to downloading articles. Our development team is doing everything we can to increase the site speed; with changes such as reducing unnecessary features on each page, creating better system architecture and optimising the way we handle images.

We have started the work on core pages around journal experience, they are article landing page, journal landing page, and will then move on to the Book core pages and search pages.

We are also planning to increase the bandwidth available for downloads, which will further increase the article download speed.

This work will involve a change to the IP address of our publishing platform. We are aware that in some cases libraries will need to reconfigure their systems to ensure there are no subsequent connection problems for their institutional users. We are reaching out to you to see what impact it will have on your systems and the kind of lead time you would need to update them. Please get in touch with our technical support team if you have any questions.

We thank you in advance of any help you can provide to make this a smooth transition for your users.