Onboarding Artstor Admins to JSTOR
By Amani Sheikh, Armaan Dandavati, and David Corneail
This year ITHAKA has made significant progress in preparing for a major platform integration: bringing Artstor and JSTOR together. As teams get closer to content completion and feature parity, PALS — a.k.a. the user onboarding team — is thinking about the process of migrating Artstor participating librarians and their institutions to a newly updated JSTOR platform where researchers can now discover and use images alongside other content like journal articles, books, and primary source documents. This migration impacts researchers at 2,000 colleges, universities, and museums. Here are some of the individual team members’ perspectives on the work that was done.
Amani (User Researcher):
Users sit at the center of great design. When speaking with Artstor administrators about moving platforms, we began to hear many of the same questions: When will Artstor go away? What do I tell my users? What will happen to our image groups?
Through these conversations we identified a need for a central location to provide Artstor admins with answers to these questions and resources that they could share and adapt within their own institutions. While we knew that there was a desire for this resource, we did not have a complete picture of the type of information and materials that would be most useful.
We’re an agile organization, so began by creating a lo-fi prototype and conducted five user interviews with a diverse group of Artstor administrators. The goal of this study was to ensure that we were answering the right questions and identifying the type of materials and resources that users would find most helpful.
After collecting some key insights, we created a hi-fidelity prototype that we used to conduct a second round of research with five more participants. During this next round we were able to validate that the information on the page was useful and actionable, and identified ways in which we could better organize and prioritize the information.
David (Product Designer):
The design process for the admin migration page included a kick-off meeting with internal stakeholders, a comparative analysis, sketching and wireframes, and a series of internal design reviews. The process ultimately informed a lo-fi and hi-fi prototype that Amani mentioned, which helped inform a final design.
The final design incorporated both internal and user feedback, which emphasized a direct, informative, and easy to navigate experience. The value of this page from the perspective of our internal stakeholders was to support our admin users during the Artstor to JSTOR migration, and through our research we found that the admin roles and responsibilities vary greatly from one institution to the other.
Users are equipped with different levels of understanding, and the design needed to reflect that in the page’s information architecture and point of view. The final solution resulted in a single page scroll experience with an interactive table of contents to assist with navigation, embedded video, human speak links, tables, and tabbed content, which helped make the site’s dense information digestible. After the final design was approved, I worked closely with Armaan to make sure that the design decisions translated to technically implemented solutions that leveraged our existing Pharos design system and a previously created sister page for Artstor users that we called the Welcome Mat.
Armaan (Software Engineer):
Implementing the page was relatively straightforward due to our previous work on the Artstor Welcome Mat. Additionally, David was able to neatly incorporate a lot of existing Pharos components into the design for the new Artstor migration hub. This made the development process simple and fun.
One of the larger learnings we brought over from our previous hub was to begin creating the framework of the page early on, and go back later to fill in content and tweak the styling. We were able to leverage “feature flags” to develop the page and deploy it to the live site without it being immediately user facing. This allowed us to deploy repeatedly and feel confident that our work fit into the larger JSTOR ecosystem, and didn’t break any shared functionality. This also allowed us to release this new page to admin users when we were ready, simply by clicking a button.
This project was a great opportunity to bring together User Insights, Design, and Engineering in order to contribute to a shared goal with the added bonus of leveraging ITHAKA’s values of #speed, #trust, and #teamwork.
If you’re interested in learning more about working at ITHAKA please reach out to ITHAKA recruiting. If you’d like to see the finished product, check out www.jstor.org/artstor-move/.
