User Centered Design at Elsevier

The End-user in the Driver’s Seat

Jaco Zijlstra

Colloque de l'Académie des sciences "Évolution des

publications scientifiques - Le regard des

chercheurs“ – Les 14-15 mai 2007

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User Centered Design Process

Begin as early as possible in the product development cycle

Iterative and rapid … allows for quick changes

Design usefulness and ease of use into the user experience

Emphasis on the user, the goal is to achieve a high level of

usability

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Understand

Know the users, their tasks,

and their goals

What information resources and tools do they

currently use?

What are their organization’s procedures?

What are their key tasks and how do they

accomplish them?

What problems do they encounter daily?

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Design

Design to fit the user and their tasks

Decisions based on user data

Basic Design Principles Simplicity

Consistency

Accessibility

User control (undo, exit)

Task efficiency

Clear error communication

Readability (visual presentation)

Aesthetics (graphics)

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Evaluate

Evaluate the UI, not the user

Key measures – Efficiency

Effectiveness, Error Rate

Satisfaction

Pitfalls – Design change based on one comment

Observation is best, users can’t report what they actually

do

Over design for non-critical or uncommon tasks

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Scopus: a case study

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Who were involved?

20 Development partners 30+ rounds of user testing 5 institutes per test 25 users per test Librarians, professors, researchers, PhD students,

graduate students,… Pour comprendre comment les scientifiques:

Recherchent Trouvent et Évaluent les documents et les informations

scientifiques

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Most common search frustrations

There is too much, it is overwhelming

How can I narrow down sensibly and exactly?

How much have I missed ?

Good searching is too complicated

Difficult to find all articles from one author

Why can’t I search everything from one point ?

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High level use cases

Finding (new) articles in a familiar subject field

Getting an overview/understanding of a new subject field

Finding author-related information

Articles by a specific author

Information to help evaluating a specific author

Author contact information

Staying up-to-date

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First step: content is king

15.000 revues académiques

Dont plus de 550 revues en « Accès Libre »

Dont presque 600 de revues Françaises

30 millions de résumés portant sur les 40 dernières années

Dont 800.000 de résumés en Anglais portant sur des articles en

Français

265 millions de références ajoutées à tous les résumés depuis 1996

250 millions de pages Web scientifiques via Scirus

13 millions de brevets

Contenu mis à jour quotidiennement

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Start broad, then refine and sort

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Searching for an author

Enter name in Author Search box

Step1

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Select your author

Which S. Albracht are you looking for?

Available information

Step2

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Author details

Unique Author ID & matched documents

Step 3

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Citation overview

Excluding self citations

Step 4

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Conclusions

Benefits of user-centered design

Ensures that what is developed is useful

Improves the user experience

Gives ownership where it belongs: the eventual users

Reduces the need for librarians to train their users on

the products they buy

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Nous vous remercions de votre attention!