Springer Nature is a sprawling scientific publisher, that had a big problem: it had no fundamental vision of itself as a whole, only as a collection of pieces.
After multiple mergers, most notably of Springer Publishing and Nature Journals, it hosts around 4000 academic journals and tens of thousands of textbooks under various imprints with various brands and websites. This created critical issues:
Late 2020 we in UX and Product leadership asked ourselves: where do we go from here?
How do we want to serve our research community in the future? What do we want to be to our users? We had the major challenge of not just finding a direction, but also implementing it.
There were three sources of complexity in this problem:
The first issue was how tackle this need to imagine a new direction without interfering with our day-to-day work. We had multiple websites to maintain and grow, how would we take on this major piece outdside our goals without disrupting ourselves?
We also had no idea where we needed to go. Should the new direction be radical? Evolutionary? We did know we had to tackle this very differently from what we used to do.
As UX & Product leadership settled on managing this issue by using an outside agency, but one we would work with closely.
One of the reasons the UX and Product VPs asked me to be part of the vision team was because of my agency experience, so I could help select the agency.
Once the agency started, I remained deeply involved, though. As the main day-to-day UXer working in the project team, I helped familiarize the agency team to the field, and the company, and the politics, bounced ideas, debated interpretations, made some and added to other visualizations, helped guide the storytelling, and often moderated discussions during our 3 meetings per week with the agency and the product leaders who had commissioned this work.
The joint team did many stakeholder interviews inside the company with our passionate experts, from the CEO and the board to our internal leads. Halfway the project team realized we needed more and better data. So we adjusted the project plan to add new, global, primary research with our users, and restarted ideation.
In broad lines, the vision asked Springer Nature to organize all knowledge in one repository, and all communication to scientists about how to be successful authors in another place close to it, and then to...
The final deck that explores the user needs, the options explored, the pros, the cons, the decision making, the example innovations, and the final choices on how to reorganize our sites, is 70 slides long. It was not frozen in time, though, we made new versions as we uncovered new information during the rest of the trajecotry.
Now that we as a team knew in which direction to move our products, how do we get the resources to get this done and accepted? How do we move forward and not let this vision die in a drawer like so many others? We had to get everyone outside the team on-board, starting with the idea that we couldn't go on as we were with all these little kingdoms not talking to each-other.
Staying deeply involved with the work by the outside agency not only kept the agency grounded in reality, it also kept us grounded in their work; it was authentically ours.
But to get the company to come along? Having been commissioned and approved by the VP of UX and the Head of Product wasn't enough to change direction digitally, we needed buy-in on all levels. We had to show our results and convince other stakeholders, professionals, co-workers, and the wider company.
To do this, as a team we started telling the story in all directions. As one of the very few people who has worked on every part of it, I became one of the two main storytellers of this vision. We told it together when we could, but also individually. We had the various decks ready, we could rattle off the main points.
I have done this now so often I can tell describe this vision to experts in other departments in 5 minutes, or the whole thing for as long as an hour to people brand new to the field of scientific publishing.
The simplest, most convincing way to tell this story was to always go back to the basic user needs we uncovered by the global research. When you have to tell a complex story about a new direction for many moving parts, you have to start with Why. Why are you upsetting the applecart? Why are you "creating this extra work"? Why do we need change?
The answer was always: because our users need us to. What we are doing now is not going to keep working. Focussing on user needs cut down enormously on the time and complexity of convincing people.
Top company leadership asked us for a flagship project so we could show everyone the direction we were going to. It had to be visible, inspiring, time-boxed, yet large enough that delivery teams would build real experience in how to get us to the future.
Being Domain Lead UX for the teams working on the main content website, I was already aware of how the teams worked and what kind of project would be successful.
Doing this first project turned out to be pivotal. Once a chunk of the main website had been transformed to show off how science could be found and communicated in the future, it became easy to see for everyone how to do the rest, and how the other properties would fit in.
This included the scholarly content of article, journal, and book pages, as well as explanatory content like front page and section pages, making the site ready for all other sites to be unified with it.
The pilot projects were received internally and externally with so much acclaim that we got the mandate to update all of link.springer.com. This is turn excited shareholders, insitutional clients, and readers so much that the unified vision became immediately entrenched as the way to go.
As a last contribution, I made a tentative schedule and roadmap of how all the other brand and content websites could be moved and merged over the years to create this unified vision. This train is now on track. I am comfortable to now step off and watch it roll along so I can go help solve the next big problem.