Tasks on this project
Stakeholder Interviews
Client Interviews
User Surveys
User Personas
User Flows
Information Architecture
Site Mapping
Wireframing
Prototyping
As the world’s first video-only scientific journal, JoVE (The Journal of Visual Experiments) is attempting to solve a major problem that plagues scientific research: the replication crisis.
This refers to the issue of scientists not being able to replicate past experiments because the methods are an overlooked section of a scientific paper. Rather than get into mind-numbing detail as to how an experiment was conducted, researchers spend their time on findings and conclusions.
JoVE solves this by giving researchers a way to publish their methods as a detailed video so that other researchers can see exactly how their protocols are conducted. JoVE has teams around the world with experience filming complex lab procedures and the team in Cambridge edits and produces the videos with the help of the submitting scientist. They have over 9000 videos that detail everything from basic lab procedure to cutting edge techniques.
JoVE came to ICS for a new site, but they wanted special attention paid to their player. These pages receive the vast majority of the site’s traffic and it’s where many users spend hours going through protocol. As such, they needed a design that would be easy to use and would work for a wide array of scientific videos.
Being a visual medium, the first step was to expand the video area itself and created a stronger hierarchy for title and authors. From here, I used worked on making the player more useful by having the video and bookmarks travel along the sidebar as the user scrolled as well as implementing a sticky subnav to allow to quick access to different parts of the protocol as well as downloads.
Lastly, I added a seemingly small, but incredibly important button to always live with the video: cite this. Academic journals are judged by their impact factor — a number that indicates how often a journal is cited. By putting this in an easily accessible spot (and by having it copy with one click) I was able to reinforce the important of citing to the thousands of scientists each day.
This project was completed at Image Conscious Studios.