Despite the two products sharing much content and linking to each other heavily, the reading experience was significantly different, which made it difficult to understand hierarchy and relevancy of information when users were researching complex topics. As you can see below headings, sub-headings and notes are styled differently, with even spacing that made it hard to scan across the content.
These heuristic problems were confirmed in user research studies when observing users read on screen, many would lean in, use the mouse cursor to keep track of their position and hastily scroll up and down to find key information. The mobile experience was illegible, which translated into only 1% of our users attempting to access the products on a mobile device.
How might we provide an optimal reading experience that provides support to our users across all devices? And how could we evolve the products so that the experience is consistent across both LexisLibrary & PSL
Firstly, with the business traditionally set with a print first approach and with the great pull to build new features we had to demonstrate the current problems and make the case to the business that this was the right problem to solve for our customers.
We had to convince the business that we needed a responsive and consistent reading experience across all devices to ensure our customers could do their research from their desk to quickly facts on their phone before court. This involved doing an audit of typography across both products to show the inconsistencies. We also conducted user research to gain insight into how customers currently used the product and tested a prototype with proposed typography.
This involved user testing to gain insight into how customers currently used the product and prototype testing to observe their reading experience with updated typography. I did a deep dive into understanding typography and the digital application for optimal reading. This coupled with our customer data to understand which devices they were using and which content they were accessing most gave us enough to produce the wireframes for testing.
Product managers were involved with testing to share the insights and we pushed ahead by involving our writing team as they were key to publishing and maintaining our content. We discovered that they were using print publishing software to write content and then this data transformed to render it digitally. This technology and process issue meant that updating typography across all of our content would be a huge task with potential to break the product. This risk was identified and we devised a tactical approach to updating typography one content type at a time.
With our products built on legacy technology that was being strangled out we always had major pushback from stakeholders when discussing the need to build in product responsivity. The discussion would focus on current data that showed our mobile traffic only taking up only 1% of traffic but that would be expected when the product was broken on any device below 1024px. This challenge was overcome with many stakeholder meetings to evangelise the value of a responsive product and demonstrate how it would improve the customer experience, increase user engagement and deliver on business goals.
Due to a pivot in priority we had to shift focus on improving search for a key customer or we risked losing a large market share.
But we had managed to get responsivity agreed as a non functional requirement for new development work.
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