Rethinking journal articles on SpringerLink
Over ten million scientific documents drawn from more than 200,000 books and 3000 journals are available online through SpringerLink. In the five years since we began building the current version of the site much has changed, both out in the research community and here at what is now Springer Nature. A platform like SpringerLink always needs to evolve, and it’s time to begin a process of renewal.
The most popular pages on the site are those for our some five and a half million journal articles, but unusually for a contemporary platform when a visitor arrives they are only shown the abstract — the full-text is hosted on a separate page. Many other publishers now offer the entire article at a single URL, which provides a better and more search-engine friendly user experience. We have long wanted to make this switch ourselves, and felt that the presentation and readability of our articles had begun to fall behind the standards set by others.
Therefore we decided our focus for the first part of 2016 would be a complete rebuild of our journal article pages, starting with the Open Access content which currently represents almost 10% of the total. The first step was to gather the team who work on SpringerLink here at our offices in London and conduct a workshop in which we explored our objective, collaborated on design ideas and sketched out a plan.
We then started building, releasing code updates to live on a daily basis. User feedback is important to us, indeed when creating a digital product it is crucial to success. From the earliest possible moment we shared a link on the current site inviting users to try the new version of the page and let us know their thoughts. This helped us decide what was important (people *really* missed citation export tools when they weren’t there) and challenged us to justify our design ideas. For example we knew we needed a larger and clearer font to facilitate scanning of the text, but people told us our initial choice was just too large, so we dialled it back a bit. Over the weeks the new version of the page evolved, and shortly after Easter we were able to switch it live as the default view for our Open Access articles.
Clearly, we are not done yet. There are still bugs to fix, features to be added and plenty of feedback which we still have to absorb. Our plan is to keep working on the new pages and start rolling them out to the rest of our journal articles over the course of the next few months. We hope that you enjoy the new article pages and find them to be an improvement. As ever, please let us know what you think.
