Application Merge

Background

JSTOR Forum is a digital collection cataloging and publishing tool designed for universities, archives, and museums. It enables institutions to share their digital collections across platforms including JSTOR, The Digital Public Library of America, and custom Omeka sites. A few examples of collections published using JSTOR Forum:

• Harvard University
• Roanoke College
• Trinity College
• University of California, Santa Barbara

Problem to Solve

JSTOR Forum was originally fragmented into separate applications for catalogers and administrators, designed to meet the needs of a specific institution with distinct roles. As more institutions subscribed, this role-based separation became less relevant and created significant operational challenges.

The siloed approach resulted in disjointed codebases, restrictive user roles, and a fragmented experience that impeded performance improvements, publishing capabilities, and future innovation.

Goal

Merge the Cataloging and Publishing tools, unifying the codebase, enhancing user workflows, and creating a more flexible, coherent platform that can scale.

Roles

• Information Architect
• Content Strategist
• UI Designer

Process

• Content and feature inventory
• Create three concepts of varying scope
• Review concepts with stakeholders and test with users
• Develop and launch final design based on evidence collected

Concept 1

Advantages

The simplest and fastest way of bringing the current admin features into the cataloging tools while maintaining some principles of user experience and design. This concept would be an easy transition for current users and quick for engineers to migrate.

Disadvantages

The administrative tasks are still separated from cataloging tasks in arbitrary and idiosyncratic ways, as they were before.

Concept 2

Advantages

The admin functionality is broken down into individual features, prioritized and streamlined, then selectively placed into workflows in a deliberate and intuitive way. This concept would be learnable by both current and new contributors. This is what we ultimately built and launched.

Disadvantages

A more complex and time-consuming effort to build and launch. Institutions would need to update their workflows and training materials.

Concept 3

Advantages

Looking toward the future, this concept shifted away from a catalog-centric experience into a publishing and content-management product. Publishing features would be integrated directly into the digital library platform, similar to a CMS.

Disadvantages

While this aligned with the future direction of the organization, it presented a profound impact on many teams and the broader JSTOR platform.

New Product Inspiration

Starting small with entry points from the platform to the publishing tool could be considered in the near term. Ultimately, ideas from this concept inspired a new product called Collection Loader.

Final Design

Dashboard

I designed a dashboard that gives users a clear overview of their projects and key collection statistics, informed by user testing feedback. Previously, users were taken directly to the last project they edited after logging in — which felt disorienting and lacked a true sense of home.

Navigation Update

I redesigned the global navigation system to better support scalability for new features, including role-based admin tools and early access to beta features. Project settings were integrated directly within each project, conveniently placed at the top of the item list to resolve the previously disjointed experience.

Outcome