Sciendo is a leading provider of academic publishing solutions, offering a range of services for scholarly works as well as professional books. They also serve as a distribution hub for academic and professional materials like books, journals, and proceedings, including open-access content.

To enhance user experience, clarity, and engagement for Sciendo customers, the decision was made to completely redesign the platform from the ground up.

Ongoing - starting in the summer of 2022

I worked together with the product and marketing teams to redesign the website, keeping only the existing branding and logo.

Sciendo provides diverse services and content access options tailored to individuals, organizations, or institutions, along with various publication formats. Streamlining and organizing the navigation of these various services and access methods presented a unique and interesting design challenge.

The recurring question was: How can we ensure a clear and user-friendly experience for all types of customers across the board, and what effect will this have on user engagement?

We carefully went through every section of the previous website, evaluating what worked and identifying areas that needed improvement. Any concerns and questionable themes were discussed with the team. We needed to figure out which aspects of the current website could serve as a framework for the redesign, what should be discarded, and which steps in the navigation could be refined to enhance access to relevant information.

After this, I created a spreadsheet including each topic and section of the platform and divided it into categories such as functionality, content, and design. Together we rated each item by priority.

We conducted a competitive analysis, gathering information about multiple publishers and publication distributors on the market, and examining their platforms for valuable insights on user experiences—looking at features, user flows, navigation, branding, tone, content, and more. This provided beneficial insights into effective strategies and offered some guidance on organizing vast amounts of information.

To consolidate all the information in one place for reviewing navigation and deciding on platform elements, creating structural diagrams was crucial. The diagram served as a control center—a place to return to, take notes, comment, and fine-tune as needed.

After identifying the essential pages and gaining a clearer overview of the content for each, I began wireframing the pages, starting with the homepage and expanding outward, diving into the page structure, and then slowly building on them and turning them into mock-ups.

Continuing with ongoing feedback and collaboration, I created high-fidelity mockups and prototypes, incorporating all the essential interactions. This ensured a clear and consistent direction for every component of the Sciendo platform. Here are a few to share:

Through many iterations over an extended period, we polished and broadened these designs, creating over 60 unique webpage types for various services, their subpages, and each type of publication—be it a book, journal, or conference, in the academic or professional realm, whether paid or open access. The website rolled out in segments, with the publication pages finalizing the latest launch in January 2024.

However, there is still a lot more do to - Sciendo's services are continuously being updated with new offers and propositions.

Since the latest launch, engagement on the platform has improved significantly.

I discovered the art of breaking down a highly complex project into smaller parts while striving for consistency. This approach creates helpful patterns that can be applied uniformly across the entire site.

Such a complex project will continue to evolve. It will be crucial to engage in ongoing activities to ensure the continued success and improvement of the user experience, such as collecting user feedback and reviews, monitoring analytics and metrics, conducting audits on accessibility, as well as developing a roadmap for future updates and enhancements based on user feedback, emerging trends, and business goals. It will be important to continuously analyze the data and iterate on the design to align with evolving user needs.

Tomek Konior - Product Manager

Magdalena Cal - Marketing Manager

Vlad Lego - Full Stack Developer

Victor Osorhan - Developer