New website launch: JISC Collections

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the redesigned JISC Collections website!

The team has worked hard on this for 18 months and we’re excited to bring it to everyone’s attention, as it represents some of our finest work to date.

JISC Collections brings a great variety of digital content to the academic market. These resources are now sold in a marketplace that brings publishers and end-users together.

Here’s a brief list of highlights:

• A hugely improved and useable catalogue, with filters and sorting
• A very bespoke basket and checkout process
• Many business processes, invoicing and reporting brought online and integrated
• Customers can now manage their subscriptions and account online
• Categorised news and events and a smarter search
• A very powerful and flexible CMS in EPiServer

This project has certainly provided us with a challenge, but one I think we’ve met brilliantly. Here’s why…

A separate specification phase

Cubeworks were originally asked to document JISC Collections’ requirements and form them into a rigorous specification and invitation to tender.

We interviewed users, exhaustively modelled the organisation’s internal and external systems, described everything in use cases, and then had the pleasure of responding to our own beautifully-written brief.

Great communication

We used a novel approach that saved time and maintained clarity during the exploration phase of the project by getting the Business Analyst and UX expert to develop their initial models physically sat together at a single computer. It was like a tag team.

We ended up with many micro-iterations and the quickest turnaround of mature interactive wireframes I’ve ever seen.

Testing times

We launched the site as a closed beta back in April. Real users were invited to join up, given full account privileges and a set of end-to-end test scenarios to work through.

We received a host of feedback concerning the smaller details – an extra catalogue filter here, a new payment note there, and numerous improvements to labelling and naming conventions which combined to take a good user experience and make it great.

EPiServer

EPiServer was our CMS of choice for such a complex website. JISC Collections were delighted because EPiServer proved to be much more flexible than their old CMS. This is was in part down to the excellent EPiServer Composer module, which allows the client to create their own page layouts in-house; new template creation is probably the most requested maintenance task ever! We also integrated their entire admin system into EPiServer so that they could edit their content, administer their catalogue and manage financial reporting all in one place behind a single login.

Form follows function

In traditional software projects there’s an approach called Big Design Up Front, where the whole solution is thought about, picked apart and agreed to Up Front. The problem is that on complex projects you often don’t know what the whole solution should be Up Front, and can spend more time figuring that out than you would have spent just building it. That’s why we use Agile methodology.

For the first time we fully applied Agile methodologies to the design process. This can be problematic because on an Agile project the solution is changing all the time. It’s a bit like decorating the interior of a house while it’s still being built and assembled – at best it’s hard to maintain overall consistency, at worst it causes large chunks of rework.

Our answer was to focus on getting a quality foundation and structure in place (the HTML – easy to chop and change) and wait until the dust has settled (after prototyping, running tests on business rules, user feedback, validation and accessibility checking) before getting out the decorating gear (Photoshop + CSS).

Here’s an example:

Using an Agile design process saved time and, crucially, meant a better end solution as everyone could focus on how the site should work separate fromwhat it should look like.

We think the result is outstanding. What do you think?