Redesigning the bookmarking process
Talis Aspire is one of the main products
I have worked on for the last three years, as part of Technology from Sage.
What is Talis Aspire?
Talis Aspire is a web browser app that helps librarians and academics manage reading lists. It fully integrates with library systems to streamline course resourcing, copyright compliance, and acquisitions.
In this project, I focused on redesigning the bookmarking process, which is one of the ways users can add resources to their lists. The goal was to make the process easier, mainly for academics, since the browser extension was developed several years ago, and it hasn’t been updated.
The challenges
Librarians complained about having to scroll down a long form to bookmark the resources, which meant academics missed information and ended up adding the wrong metadata. As a consequence, the reviews team needed to spend more time reviewing metadata and looking for better resources.
Users also complained about the outdated user interface and more specific usability issues in the forms.
After this, I started affinity mapping and framing the pains as “how might we…” followed by a prioritisation exercise where we tried to identify the areas we wanted to focus on and then iterated from there.
Once we prioritised the HMW, I ran an ideation session with members of the team, and then I started with low-fidelity mockups.
After several design iterations, I ran a user testing session with academics and librarians, where I tested three different prototypes. After the user testing session, I documented and played the results from the user testing back to the team.
Finally, the development team put together an alpha demo, iterating some of the new features and designs and testing it live with some users.
The process
In the discovery phase, I used the discovery canvas to help me get an overview of the challenges, which methodology to use, and the timeline.
It started with an investigation of user feedback from the ideas pool, previous user testing, and available data from Pendo and internal sources.
Then I started facilitating a user journey mapping, where I invited stakeholders from the technical, product and operations teams. Together we identified the pains in each step of the flow.
