The story behind the redesigned Bibliocloud

How our next-generation publishing system got less “Star Trek” and more usable — and what we learned

Bibliocloud is a beautiful, powerful system for publishers to manage the process of making books. This week we launched its redesign to our client-base of over 30 publishers, and there was happiness all round.

But this project has also involved a lot of useful upheaval. Mid-way through the process, I joined co-founders Emma and Dave, and we await two more colleagues in June. What was once a bootstrapped start-up is now a thriving business. With my arrival came a fresh pair of eyes and some “ouch” moments for the team. But with lessons learned and extra pairs of hands, we’re feeling proud and invigorated.

So here’s how we made Bibliocloud easier on the eyes, and — more importantly — easier to use — and what we learned along the way.

Why did we embark on a redesign?

Bibliocloud had been looking a bit lacklustre, truth be told.

Emma’s original design inspiration had been the “main computer of the Star Trek Enterprise”: charming and delightful for her own list of science fiction and fantasy books, Snowbooks, but not necessarily our clients’.

Over time, the design became less quirky, but then it got a bit grey…

So in December 2015, Emma decided that it was time for a refresh. She’d adopt Google’s universally pleasing material design principles (behind sites like Gmail and YouTube) so as to give everything a lift.

We’d also received some brilliant suggestions from our customers for how to condense the system, which had sprawled into complexity.

The benefits of the redesign

Firstly, the coral!

(OK, not everyone has loved the coral.)

But they have loved the material design. Instead of inter-galactic, Bibliocloud now feels familiar. Recognisable fonts and icons lend confidence. As one customer put it:

“Even I can navigate my way around easily. It’s really, really good.”

The books come centre-stage

We’re publishers, too, and we want Bibliocloud to make you feel proud of your books.

So in the redesign, when you’re working on a book, its cover appears in thumbnail. The interface itself takes a back-step.

It’s faster to navigate

Previously, we had a huge double sidebar offering infinite options for reaching your tasks. Now, we’ve reduced it to one, realising that it’s quicker and easier to have one simple way.

Fewer steps to complete tasks = more time saved for busy publishers

And one of my contributions: an action-focused header on every page. Edit your metadata. Create a contact.

It’s easier to use

Thanks to Janet at Liverpool University Press, we condensed seven pages of metadata entry into one, and 25 for production into another (25!!).

“Having the metadata all in one place is so much easier”

It’s more useful

Bibliocloud’s ultimate mission is to make good metadata effortless — even fun: making it easy to get information into the system as early and as completely as possible. Metadata is “a love letter to the future”, enabling books to be discovered all along the supply chain.

With the one-pager and our new validation tools, we’re one step closer — and that translates directly to revenue for our customers.

What came up during the process?

When Emma began the redesign late last year, she thought she could “bash it out by Christmas.” It’s now May. So a lot happened along the way…

Firstly, Emma fell down the rabbit hole

Initially, Emma’s intention was just to make the site prettier. But then she decided to make a big usability improvement at the same time (condensing those metadata pages into one) — and the work began to snowball.

As the number of dependencies grew, our customers all had to wait for one big release, instead of getting continuous, smaller improvements.

From now on, we’ll be more rigorous about avoiding long-running “feature branches” and prioritising the continuous improvements that save customers time.

Next, I joined, and we discovered some truths about the system

I joined Bibliocloud in March as Bibliocloud’s “employee number one”.

As I started to acquaint myself with the system, I had plenty of “wow!” moments. I couldn’t believe how powerful Bibliocloud was and how much time it would have saved me in my previous publishing roles. Gantt charts instead of “progress meetings”! Trell0-style pipelines instead of minutes!

But as I attempted to get tasks done and went, “huh?” every five minutes, Emma and Dave realised that the system was less usable than they’d thought. As publishers and programmers, they’d been naturally customer-centric, to a degree — but their familiarity as creators of the system had inured them to its snags. And being a time-strapped duo, their usability testing had been informal — combined with training or demos.

There were a few tearful moments, but Emma soon revived as I made suggestions, rewrote copy, helped restructure the user manual and started reaching out to customers.

We started organising ourselves around user experience

It’s a thrilling time for Bibliocloud as we await two more colleagues and we’re able to be more proactive — but it also means we’re in need of some formal process.

We got organised with a Kanban board for the redesign that represents all the key tasks, prioritised by user need.

We started each day with a traditional “stand-up” meeting for my benefit.

And we’ve built in some proper analytics for the site so we can understand how customers are using it in real time. (Emma and Dave had been doing this manually.)

What did we learn?

• Releases should always be as incremental and continuous as possible to avoid delaying benefits to customers
• Our design should be usable first; pretty second. And we’ll let the books come centre-stage.
• There’s lots we still don’t know about how our customers use the system and what they still need. Now we can prioritise that.

Where are we now?

Right now, we feel buoyant and raring to improve Bibliocloud still further. We’re more grateful and appreciative to our ever-patient customers now that we’ve seen Bibliocloud from their perspective. And we’ve learned our lesson:

We don’t just want to be the most beautiful publishing system — we want to be the one that gets our customers’ jobs done the most easily, quickly and to the best standard.

So, onwards!