Intro
Helping Nature to ideate a new service proposition to help scientist keep up-to-date
Intro
Helping Nature to ideate a new service proposition to help scientist keep up-to-date
Nature.com (part of the Macmillan Publishing Group) is currently embarking on a process of change that responds to evolving scientist needs and publishing business models. To support an industry wide digital first evolution, Nature is venturing on a journey to define new service propositions and frameworks of engagement between the wider scientific community and Nature Publishing Group.
Goals
Validate a new service proposition idea to grain back traction with a diminishing readership
Enter the digital publishing arena and find ways to monetise new digital service offerings
Make existing data aggregation tool investment work harder and find new life
Digital publishing service proposition
A highly collaborative and people centered design process to ideate and validate the idea. User interviews with key global scientist audiences informed the most prevalent unmet needs and desires, behaviours, expectations and further innovation ideas. In ideation workshops with Nature’s editors and selected audiences, core user journeys and information architecture were collaboratively mapped out, ensuring stakeholder engagement and knowledge share. A fully designed interactive prototype was tested virtually with global audiences, validating the core idea, user experience and business goals. The insight were presented to the board to raise finances and to kick start the technical prototyping.
Persona workshop
Journey mapping workshop
User interview synthesis
Primary research findings:
- No time to keep up-to-date with the volume of new research data available from both main stream publishers to open source arenas
- Frustrated with the need to self validate the relevance of data to their own research
- Expense of subscriptions on limited funding
- Fear of research impact being diminished in an over crowded sector leading to funding cuts
- Limited access to publish through top tier publications
- Red tape surrounding publication of data
- A myriad of diverse tools and services to manage data research but no single seamless platform
- Managing the different research needs from lab work to teaching to personal development
Finding the opportunity
We ran journey mapping workshops to identify the current touch-points for the various stages from the 'Research' life cycle through to the 'Research to publish' lifecycle. This helped in identifying the key opportunities where Nature could add value in keeping scientists up-to-date with the latest research and news, through to how they might replace the myriad of tools and services used into a single touch-point.
Jounrey mapping
Paper prototyping
Market research workshops helped position the new service within the scientist’s customer journeys and prioritised the Minimal Viable Product to launch with.
Opportunity map
Wireframes
Solution
New Page
New Page
Scientists need to keep ‘up to date’ with each other, with their research and with the broader scientific community. At present they use a myriad of diverse tools and services to achieve this. We helped ideate and validate a new service proposition that aimed to transform a traditional print publication into a future thinking digital publishing model.
Algorithm led feed
The key to successful adoption of the platform would be an algorithm that responded to users behavioural patterns to ensure it's relevance. The feeds would push information to the user rather than them having to search for it. Key features were:
- Ability to set topic preferences from a broad to a narrow view
- Flag articles that want to bookmark to read later
- Set data and topic preferences to set broad or narrow views of data
- A switch to set the time a user has to read data
- Ability to sort feed by data that’s trending
Articles
Relevant articles could be read online or as a PDF. Altmetric data helped show how much research papers were trending via social channels.
Sharing
A key feature was the ability to create reading lists in-order to sort and manage data and assign to others to read across teams or classes.
New Page
New Page
Influence
Another key feature was the ability to follow 'influencers' reading lists. Useful for students who want to know the latest research in their chosen feild.
“Chris worked on a project for us at Nature Publishing Group which was one of our very first customer centric programmes.
He brought incredible insight into how to run a programme focussed fully on customers needs, quickly got up to speed with our market/audience, and provided great product ideas and insight in developing a prototype.
Chris also ran market research around the product and co-ordinated workshops. It was a pleasure to work with Chris - not only did he ‘get’ the business, the project and the aims & objectives, but he steered us to ensure customer centricity was as the heart of what we were doing. But more importantly it was fun and Chris was a great person to work with.”
Testing
What we learnt...
Sometimes the solution is to disrupt old business models. This project showed that traditional methods of pull publishing was not the way to target a user base that had no time to keep themselves up-to-date. Businesses must be brave and seek out alternative ways to engage users to keep their brands front of mine or loose them to alternative providers. The holy grail for this project was to prove that an ecosystem that your customers are so invested in, means there is no reason to switch brands, giving the ability to continuously up-sell new products and services.
My role: Define business opportunities / UX & Creative Direction / Research / Architecture / UI Design / User testing