Library Viewer

Improving the discovery and reading experience of the digitised items from Wellcome’s diverse collections

 

Project

UX Design /
Wellcome Collection

Responsibilities

Product strategy, landscape audit, usage data analysis, user story map, design sprint facilitation

 

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The Wellcome Collection provides thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, and photos online. After the initial launch of a next generation image viewer, our team’s next task was to explore ways to integrate other material types including books, manuscripts and multi-page visual materials.

Based on usage data of the current content viewer, we rebuilt the form factor with core functionalities and adding necessary controls with affordance to scale.

 

“I want a visual sense of how big the book is and what it contains just like browsing bookshelves in your library.”

– library visitor

 
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Process

Explored ways for users to discover and engage with our digitised library contents through iterative design approaches.

  • Reviewed usage data of current viewer to understand the behaviour of viewing multi-page documents.

  • Working with the PM, prioritised the user insights from previous user testing and developed a user story map.

  • Conducted audit of digital content viewers assessing best practices and trends.

  • Facilitated concept exploration and collaborative sketching during a multi-day design sprint taking inspiration from existing data and user insights.

  • Engaged library experts to show-and-tell of original objects from the collections to demonstrate various aspects we need to consider in designing the viewer.

  • Designed and built interactive prototype with the developers for user research.

  • Identified final concept to focus from several competing value propositions through qualitative research, concept testing and iteration.

  • Presented our design process and concepts to the library department stakeholders to keep them up to date on the progress and transition plan.

 
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Outcome

Created a responsive tool that provides overview of the content and guiding them to the relevant section replicating physical interaction of flipping through the book.

  • Increased avg. time on viewer by 58%, page views by 7.9%, and total downloads by 9%

  • Continued to iterate based on analytics data and prioritized the future enhancement features