I’m really looking forward to presenting at The Lower Decks. A Symposium on Janeway and Open Access Publishing, on May 21-22 2026. I’ll be joining online on Thursday 21st May 2026 with my paper, “Zoom Out to Flow Better: Visualising Janeway’s User Workflows“.
This work comes out of a simple question I kept coming back to as a journal editor: what is it actually like for my colleagues to use Janeway? To explore that, I’ve supervised student projects that take a user centred design approach to address the question.
Across these projects, we combine heuristic reviews with interviews and task based observations. Small groups of participants, representing a mix of roles and experience levels, join remote testing sessions. This helps to obtain a range of perspectives. We analyse the data thematically to identify recurring usability issues alongside user motivations, behaviours, frustrations, and goals.
In the talk, I’ll reflect on the limits of of user testing in a publishing context. It is surprisingly difficult to capture meaningful insights when people are not working under real conditions, with real deadlines and pressures shaping how they move through the system.
What I’ve found more useful is the need for conceptual outputs based on the participants’ insights. In particular, flowcharts that can help map Janeway workflows by role. (Former student Karine Løhre Andersen did some great work along these lines). If we are able to zoom out and look at the full process in this way, the complexity and dimensions of scholarly publishing may become much more comprehensible. It also may help make more clear just how challenging it is to meaningfully improve user experience within these kinds of systems.
If you’re attending The Lower Decks, hopefully I’ll see you there online!
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