Redesigning the ProQuest platform

AT A GLANCE

ProQuest is a world leader in collecting, organising, and publishing information for researchers, staff, and students in libraries and schools around the world. Their core product is the ProQuest platform, a website for searching and viewing scholarly journals, newspapers, reports, working papers, and datasets along with millions of pages of digitised historical primary sources and more than 450,000 ebooks. Working with the ProQuest user experience and design team I was heavily involved in a redesign of the ProQuest platform website. ProQuest wanted a modern, responsive website that would deliver an exceptional user experience to its users.

Creating the new design

Using insights and user feedback from the existing site, and working collaboratively with the visual design lead I created an Axure prototype for the new responsive design. The prototype covered key pages and journeys on both desktop and mobile and used the new ProQuest UX framework – a set of common product branding and look and feel guidelines and components based on Bootstrap.

You can access the ProQuest platform prototype online

Axure prototype - Search results — I created a prototype using Axure for the new design

Axure prototype - Mobile — The prototype covered both desktop and mobile

Evaluating the new design

I carried out remote moderated usability testing of an early version of the new design in order to gather user feedback and to identify any usability issues that would need to be resolved. I also set-up and evaluated remote unmoderated usability testing of an early mobile version of the redesign using usertesting.com.

usertesting.com video analysis — I carried out usability testing, including remote usability testing using usertesting.com

Supporting the build

I worked closely with the Agile development team to support the build of the new design. This included defining user stories, reviewing updates and being the point of contact for user experience design queries and questions within the scrum team.

Beta testing the new design

I helped set-up and run a Beta test of the new design in order to benchmark the user experience against the current site. User satisfaction ratings and KPIs for the new design were captured using a user survey, and onsite analytics.

Online survey for ProQuest beta study — A survey was run to in order to benchmark the user experience against the current site

The results

The new design has been very well received by ProQuest platform users, and has been highlighted internally within ProQuest as a great example of UX design. It won the best interface award in The Charleston Advisors Annual Readers’ Choice Awards and has resulted in not only greater user satisfaction, but also improved KPIs across the site.