PLOS Aperta

Manuscript Submission & Management System

Role: Lead UX Designer

Aperta is a web application for authors to submit their research manuscripts to PLOS for publication and for staff to manage the editorial process. It includes an extensive, flexible workflow management system and robust CRM-like tools to allow staff to conduct technical checks, manage the peer review process, and prepare manuscripts for publication.

The Challenge

PLOS is a non-profit, open-access, Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publisher. They pioneered an open-access business model where authors or their academic institutions pay a publication fee only if their article passes peer review and is accepted for publication. However, for every article that’s published, there are many others that were rejected but have cost PLOS time and money to process.

How could PLOS reduce costs while providing authors with a superior user experience?

The Solution

By building their own manuscript submission and management system from the ground up, PLOS hoped to:

  • Stop paying millions of dollars in fees for a third party system.

  • Automate editorial processes and reduce staff workload.

  • Allow workflows to be easily customized and optimized.

  • Streamline the author submission and publishing process.

Project Inception

I collaborated with a small multidisciplinary project team comprised of subject matter experts, product managers, and executive stakeholders throughout the discovery and product definition phases.

User Research

I interviewed researchers and authors at UC Berkeley and UCSF, and leveraged the results of large-scale PLOS author surveys to identify opportunities and author pain points.

Ideation & Whiteboarding

Using a collaborative ideation process, we quickly identified opportunities, defined and prioritized the problems we needed to solve, and anticipated risks.

Design & Implementation

After completing the inception phase, the project was sent to an innovation incubator for the better part of a year. The result was a minimum viable product (MVP) that delivered a good user experience to authors but more work was required to address the needs of PLOS editorial staff. PLOS took the project back in-house in 2015 and I assumed the role of UX lead, working with another designer to add the features that would make Aperta a viable solution for PLOS’s editors, reviewers, editorial assistants, and contractors.

Lean UX

I used a Lean UX approach to quickly design and test small, self-contained feature sets supporting an Agile development process.

User Testing

I conducted regular user tests, analyzed the results, prioritized findings, and drove the results back into the design cycle, ensuring that features earned their place in the product.

Ideation

In collaboration with our editorial team and product manager, I explored product concepts, screen flows, and interactions, and began to flesh out the functionality required by PLOS staff to do their jobs.

Wireframing & High Fidelity Mockups

I produced wireframes, high-resolutions mockups, and prototypes, and worked side-by-side with developers to build better workflow management tools for Aperta.

Style Guide

I created and maintained a style guide to help other designers, front-end developers, and QA engineers maintain consistency across a distributed team and throughout the long product development lifecycle. The style guide included global and component-level specifications, interaction patterns, and implementation-specific information (e.g. SASS variables) where appropriate.

Conclusion

Aperta launched in the spring of 2016 for PLOS Biology, a journal with a relatively low publication volume. It was well received by authors and the community and we kept our editorial staff happy with constant improvements. Development continued with the goal of bringing our other, higher-volume journals onto the platform.

Unfortunately, due to declining revenue and increasing costs, PLOS did not have the resources to scale up Aperta. Thus, in the winter of 2017, PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt made the difficult decision to stop development on the project. PLOS has since made Aperta available on GitHub as an open source project.