Role: Lead UX Designer, 2013, 2015-2018
Aperta is a web application for authors to submit their research manuscripts to the Public Library of Science (PLOS) for publication and for PLOS staff to manage the editorial process. It includes an extensive, flexible workflow management system and robust CRM-like tools to allow PLOS staff to conduct technical checks, manage the peer review process, and prepare manuscripts for publication.
Links: https://github.com/Aperta-project/Aperta, https://www.plos.org
PLOS is a non-profit, open-access, Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publisher. They pioneered an open-access business model where authors or their academic institutions pay a publication fee only if their article passes peer review and is accepted for publication. However, for every article that’s published, there are many others that were rejected but have cost PLOS time and money to process.
How could PLOS reduce costs while providing authors with a superior user experience?
By building their own manuscript submission and management system from the ground up, PLOS hoped to:
1. Stop paying millions of dollars in fees for a third party system.
2. Automate editorial processes and reduce manual work by PLOS staff.
3. Allow workflows to be easily customized and optimized for efficiency.
4. Make the submission and publishing process easier for authors.
I collaborated with a small multidisciplinary project team comprised of subject matter experts, product managers, and executive stakeholders throughout the discovery and product definition phases.
User Research: I interviewed researchers and authors at UC Berkeley and UCSF, and leveraged the results of large-scale PLOS author surveys to identify opportunities and author pain points.
Ideation & Whiteboarding: Using a collaborative ideation process, we quickly identified opportunities, defined and prioritized the problems we needed to solve, and anticipated risks.
After completing the inception phase, the project was sent to an innovation incubator for the better part of a year. The result was a minimum viable product (MVP) that delivered a good user experience to authors but more work was required to address the needs of PLOS editorial staff.
PLOS took the project back in-house in 2015 and I assumed the role of UX lead, working with another designer to add the features that would make Aperta a viable solution for PLOS’s editors, reviewers, editorial assistants, and contractors.
Lean UX: I used a Lean UX approach to quickly design and test small, self-contained feature sets supporting an Agile development process.
User Testing: I conducted regular user tests, analyzed the results, prioritized findings, and drove the results back into the design cycle, ensuring that features earned their place in the product.
Sketching: In collaboration with our editorial team and product manager I explored product concepts, screen flows, and interactions, and began to flesh out the functionality required by PLOS staff to do their jobs.
Wireframing & High Fidelity Mockups: I produced wireframes, high-resolutions mockups, and prototypes, and worked side-by-side with developers to build better workflow management tools for Aperta.
Style Guide: I created and maintained a style guide to help other designers, front-end developers, and QA engineers maintain consistency across a distributed team and throughout the long product development lifecycle. The style guide included global and component-level specifications, interaction patterns, and implementation-specific information (e.g. SASS variables) where appropriate.
Aperta launched in the spring of 2016 for PLOS Biology, a journal with a relatively low publication volume. It was well received by authors and the community and we kept our editorial staff happy with constant improvements. Development continued with the goal of bringing our other, higher-volume journals onto the platform.
Unfortunately, due to declining revenue and increasing costs, PLOS did not have the resources to scale up Aperta. Thus, in the winter of 2017, PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt made the difficult decision to stop development on the project. PLOS has since made Aperta available on GitHub as an open source project
Just because a project didn’t succeed doesn’t make it a failure. My experience on Aperta was invaluable and PLOS was able to take away essential insights into workflow optimization and automation and drive them into smaller, more achievable projects. As Alison tweeted after announcing she was shutting down Aperta, “… we've had great feedback on the interface from users and hope to be able to repurpose that experience in the future.”