User Research for Scholarly Tools

The problem

Tools are routinely shipped without evidence that they support the work they are meant to support. Deposit forms get abandoned, fields get skipped or filled with values that pass validation without being correct — and by the time the data reaches the catalogue, the decisions that shaped its quality have already been made, invisibly, at the point of entry.

Our approach

We gather evidence about how researchers and data professionals actually use scholarly tools — through interviews, usability testing, and workflow mapping — and return it as concrete interface and workflow changes. The focus is the points where data is described, created, or collected: deposit forms, electronic lab notebooks, instrument capture screens. That's where catalogue quality is decided, long before any clean-up team sees the record.

What we deliver

• —Interview programmes, usability testing, and workflow shadowing
• —Analysis of drop-off, completion rates, and field-level error patterns
• —UI/UX recommendations as annotated mockups and component specifications
• —Controlled-vocabulary and terminology-lookup integrations for forms and ELNs
• —Test plans for measuring change after redesign

How we work

The Basic package delivers the research, analysis, and prioritised redesign recommendations. The Advanced package takes the recommendations into implementation, or into a working demonstrator of the redesigned interface — turning findings into something users can actually use.