client overview

The Public Philosophy Journal (PPJ) is a new open-access journal with the goals of transforming the peer review process and fostering dialogue about socially-relevant philosophical issues. In 2020, PPJ received a Mellon Foundation grant to develop their web presence. In 2021, they contracted the MSU iOS Design Lab to both redesign their WordPress website and help them with enhancing their web presence.

project overview

My involvement with PPJ has spanned across multiple years; I was present at initial conversations about he journal and have served as a reviewer for the journal as well. I was brought in by iOS Design Lab due to my background knowledge and to serve as a UX researcher and liaison between the academic editorial board and the design team.

My role: UX Researcher, Lead for Client Communication

Team: UX researcher & UX designer

The process

At the outset of this project, I drafted an initial plan for the process of redesigning the website, including participant recruitment emails, interview question for user interviews and usability testing, data storage methods, project goals, and project deliverables. Our point of contact is the current postdoctoral researcher at PPJ. We reviewed this plan with them and worked with them to develop a strategy for user interview recruitment that included direct emails and social media posts.

In November/December 2021, after recruiting candidates, I led our user interview process. This process consisted of nine interviews with members of the PPJ community and the interview questions focused on their experiences with the PPJ website. From these user interviews, we created a few basic user personas, as well as identified areas for improvement.

After my collaborator performed information architecture inventory of the current website, we used a combination of this information and the user interviews to collaboratively design a new site architecture. As opposed to the matrix architecture of the previous website, we chose a hierarchical architecture to enhance the experience for those visiting the website for specific roles or reasons (such as authoring or reviewing an article). After creating a low-fidelity prototype of the website, we approached our contact at PPJ who approved of the new hierarchy and flow.

In the course of our user interview work and background research, branding and identity for the PPJ website stood out as areas for possible improvement. We wanted to create an opportunity for the PPJ editorial board to drive decisions about their identity and logo. To this end, I designed an asynchronous logo ideation activity using Google Jamboard for members of the PPJ Editorial Board to collect ideas and inspiration for the development of a new logo as well as adjustments to the color scheme and font families used on the website. We are currently in the stage of testing out logo components and refining the overall vision of how a logo could represent PPJ. While PPJ chose to remain with their current logo, we were able to work with them on updating the fonts, color scheme, and adding their name to the initial wordmark for increased clarity. Additionally, we found an alternate client within the group for one of the logos created during the process.

The UX designer took the lead on implementing changes to the WordPress site based on our research and updated site map. I contributed to some design choices, content changes, labeling, and interacting with our client contact.

Currently, this site is in final preparation for client review. Images of the old website and the current beta version of the new site can be seen below. Due to budget and staffing issues, we have chosen to forego usability testing and instead monitor analytics for three months after the launch of this website. Prior to this new website, PPJ did not collect any analytics, so not only will this help PPJ develop an analytics strategy, but will allow us to monitor pages and content over time.

Current Website

Beta Version of New Website

Deliverables

The new Public Philosophy Journal will be live in late April/early May 2022. We will also author a final report that takes documents our process, allows them to maintain and change their website going forward, and offers suggestions on ways that they can improve their overall web presence.

Lessons learned

Project in progress.