Abstracts UI and user journey review
CMS / Eventsforce
What
Abstracts are short pieces of text: summaries of research which are submitted to conferences and publications as a type of advertising for the full piece of research. Organisations can then decide if they want to feature the full research in their event or publication.
Sometimes they can also include diagrams and images, but mostly they are a paragraph of text with multiple authors - the people who controbuted to the full research paper.
Why
Since some clients use Eventsforce to organise and run academic events, having a facility for participants to submit and review abstracts is a great add-on.
The Classic version of Eventsforce has this add-on already, it seems to the the type of functionality that was added to in a rather haphazard manner so some journeys are quite convoluted.
We needed to include Abstracts in the new X5 version of Eventsforce sp this was a great opportunity to overhaul the feature and improve it.
How
The existing Classic Abstracts system is huge and confusing - to get my head around it, I followed this process:
- I took screenshots of every page, modal and hover state that I could find, and put them into one Figma file
- I then recreated every page and modal in Figma, in the new X5 design - this made me truly focus on the functionality and small details while building familiarity with the processes
- Then I went back to the beginning and started refining and improving my mockups (with the Product Manager’s approval), simplifying a lot of the processes and screens
- The Product Manager broke the workload up into multiple tech chunks for Jira stories, and we focused on each smaller piece
- I reused currently used interfaces and tools to make the dev build quicker and easier, as well as consistent for the user
- I then created a set of user journey wireframes - normally this is done at the beginning of the process but the process itself changed the journeys so I created them at the end as a visual summary of the functionality
Result
The new Abstracts structure is now a more streamlined and easy-to-understand process for the user.
It challenged my understanding of the abstracts process and what can be done to make something so huge more user friendly.
It was a great collaborative experience between the Product Manager and I - I went ahead with mocking up my suggestions for how it could work and he was a great help with confirming what was useful and what we could refine even further.
Design
Front-end submission details - previous and new versions
Back-end submission view - previous and new versions
