166 sspcc1 b_newman
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New New Things--Trends to Watch in Professional Publishing
New New Things--Trends to Watch in Professional PublishingRichard W. NewmanSSP, June 8, 2006
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In the Beginning…
• There was Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, father of the Web
• Those who shared his vision took the technology and developed new application after new application
• New was better
• Lots of new features made Web sites look timely, created buzz, generated traffic
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And It Continues Today:Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
• Presentations at SSP, PSP, CSE, other professional meetings
• Online host’s new features• 47 new at HighWire meeting in May
• New features on competitor sites
• Advice from authors, board members, readers, librarians, gadget freak colleagues
• This morning’s Wall Street Journal
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Continuous Pressures to Add New Features
• Self-imposed, after watching Kent Anderson presentations
• Competitive pressures—they have it, don’t we need it?
• The need to impress others with your technological prowess
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Adding More and More, But Why?
• The primary focus has been: • What are new and better ways to do things?• not ways to evaluate what we have done• not what should be replaced .
• Does “new” always mean worthwhile?• Resources are finite• Space on Web pages is limited
• at least “above the fold”
• Without restraint…
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Sobering Feedback
• Librarians at Charleston Conference• worry about feature cost• like trade show booths• their focus was content
• Physicians at Council of Science Editors• don’t know about, or use, or have time for,
most features
• JAMA/Archives Web survey• few know about features• even in a “survey of the willing”
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What the Question Isn’t
• Is it new?
• Is it state-of-the art?
• Is it on other sites?
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The Key Strategic Questionsfor New Features
• What problem are we trying to solve? • Have readers cited the problem?• Have readers requested the proposed
solution?
• Will it attract a key audience (authors, academics, physicians)?
• Are our intelligent competitors doing it?• Do we know whether their readers use it?• Or are we throwing money down the same
sinkhole they already have?
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How Do You Evaluate Potential Features?
• Are you trying to attract readers? authors? media? the public?
• What do users expect/need/want?
• What makes them want to come back?
• Do the bells and whistles matter to them, ultimately?
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How Do You Evaluate Potential Features?
• What is your metric? • subscriptions?
• Web hits?
• submissions?
• impact factor?
• notoriety?
• Can your site be all things to all people?
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How Do you Evaluate Ideas?3-Stage Screening Process
• First screen: Before investing any time or effort
• Second screen: Before implementing
• Third screen: After implementing
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Preliminary Screening: Will It Improve an Important Metric?
• Quality metrics:• Impact Factor
• Times-cited statistic
• Commercial metrics:• Subscription sales
• Usage statistics
• Readership scores (for journals that carry advertising)
• Features are a means to an end
• Site sexiness is not an important metric
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Preliminary Screening: Will It Improve an Important Metric?
• Quality metrics:• Impact Factor
• Times-cited statistic
• Commercial metrics:• Subscription sales
• Usage statistics
• Readership scores (for journals that carry advertising)
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The Quality Metrics
• Relate to content
• New technology feature will not improve the quality of a journal’s content, but…
• Could make existing content more visible:• RSS
• PDA alerts
• Could help attract/retain authors:• Author Data Center
• Publish-ahead-of-print
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Preliminary Screening: Will It Improve an Important Metric?
• Quality metrics:• Impact Factor
• Times-cited statistic
• Commercial metrics:• Subscription sales
• Usage statistics
• Readership scores (for journals that carry advertising)
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The Commercial Metrics
• Relate to usage
• Usage is difficult to measure for print journals• pass-along estimates
• journals generally do not circulate
• some libraries use re-shelving counts as the only possible usage statistic
• COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) reports show which journals are most used
• Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) will make aggregating easier
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The Commercial Metrics
• Increased importance of usage statistics:• Major pharmaceutical company analyzed the
cost of each full-text access by company staff (journal price --divided by--full text views).
• Librarian informed us that the cost per access for JAMA and for eight of the Archivesjournals was within acceptable limits.
• No criteria beyond cost per full-text download used in the evaluation
• Impact Factor, ISI “times cited” statistics, and other potential factors were ignored.
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The Commercial Metrics
• No evidence that librarians select online journals because of features
• Only full-text article usage is typically evaluated in library statistics
• even publishers have difficulty obtaining feature statistics
• New features can help explain price increases
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Possible Metric-Focused Criteria
• Favor: • features that drive users to articles
• e-mail a friend
• intra-site links that drive traffic to other articles (“site stickiness”)
• related article links (e.g., editorial)
• carry search-engine search to site
• Be Cautious:• search bells and whistles, unless your journal
is a portal site (not destination site)
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Second Screen: Might Actual Readers Find It, Use It?
• Key is actual users in non-survey environment• user panels
• in-depth interviews or non-intrusive observation
• Probe how new feature would be used in day-to-day activities
• Usability testing of prototype to ensure that users will find feature
• Scenarios to see if feature fits into logical workflow:
• don’t focus scenarios too closely on feature being examined
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Second Screen: Might Actual Readers Find It, Use It?
• Be neutral in studies
• Reject the role as champion
• Be a scientist, not a partisan
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Final Screen: Is It Actually Used?
• Most-used feature stats much more important than most-read article info
• Is typical workflow what you anticipated or want?
• Where do users abandon the path?• Sophisticated statistics package desirable• Simple, but effective, techniques if journal
cannot afford sophisticated package• Snapshot data better than nothing
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Before Abandoning a Feature, Try New Placement
• Commercial sites do this regularly; Washington Post daily
• Remember to adhere to prevailing placement standards and conventions
• Jakob Nielsen's Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.
• In visiting all these other sites, people become accustomed to the prevailing design standards and conventions.
• When users arrive at your site, they assume it will work the same way as other sites.
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It’s OK to Delete Features
• Especially if license, or other ongoing fee is involved
• Page real estate in valuable
• Too many choices may confuse or distract readers
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The 3-Step Process
• Will the proposed feature improve an important quality or commercial metric?
• Is it likely to be used, based on:• ability to meet a user need
• visibility on the Web site
• Is it actually being used?
Final advice: Wait, if in doubt
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Being First Is Generally Unimportant
PIONEER
• Ampex
• Books.com
• Compuserve
• Bowmer
EXPLOITER
• JVC, Sony
• Amazon.com
• AOL
• Texas Instruments
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Don’t Be Afraid to Try, and Fail
• Batting 1.000 is a bad statistic
• Experiment, observe, react
• Share negative results with scholarly community, too
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