Integrating Research & Teaching: JSTOR + Artstor

Redesigning the platform to unify research and teaching resources, empowering educators and students to create, manage, and share collections seamlessly.

JSTOR + Artstor
Role: Product Designer (solo designer on front-end platform team)
Team: JSTOR / Artstor Integration Project
Timeline: Summer 2020
  • Led experience design, prototyping, and MVP planning based on research insights.
  • Collaborated with a new PM, UX researcher, and SMEs from Artstor.
  • Responsible for defining achievable features for the MVP that would excite users while meeting technical and resource constraints.

Context & Challenges

Users:

  • Students: research or project work.
  • Educators: curated collections of materials for teaching, often reused semester after semester.

The Challenge:

Artstor users had invested years in building collections of images and teaching materials. Migrating this content to a new, integrated JSTOR platform risked disrupting their workflows and losing trust. We needed to transition users seamlessly, maintain engagement, and showcase the value of the new platform.

Why it mattered:

The Artstor user base was vital to the business, and keeping these educators happy was critical. The project also represented a business-driven vision: create a single research platform where text and image content could coexist, enabling richer storytelling and connections across resources.

Constraints:

  • Migration during COVID-19, remote collaboration, and tight timelines.
  • Limited backend support initially.
  • Scope trade-offs to balance existing favorite features vs. what users actually needed.
JSTOR + ArtstorTeam brainstorm how we might support the needs of both JSTOR and Artstor users.

Research & Insights

User Interviews

We conducted user interviews with Artstor users to understand their workflows and pain points.

SME Panel Discussion

We conducted a panel discussion with Artstor Subject Matter Experts (SME) to dive deeper into workflows and pain points uncovered through our first round of interviews.

Concept Testing

We conducted concept testing with Artstor users to gauge their interest in the new combined platform and features.

Key Findings

  • Users were frustrated with removed or poorly replaced features.
  • Organizing image groups on Artstor was found to be extremely tedious and time-consuming.
  • Sharing image groups posed significant challenges for both faculty and students.
  • Art history teaching required connecting images with historical context; our platform fell short.

Design Principles

Based on our research, we created three design principles to guide our work:

  1. Improve what's working: Enhance existing workflows rather than forcing users to start over.
  2. Make it easy to manage content: Reduce friction in organizing and maintaining large collections.
  3. Meet users where they are: Support integration into external tools, reflecting real teaching workflows.
JSTOR + Artstor8-up activity to imagine a future research tool.

MVP Scope & Solutions

  • Enhanced image group representation: Improved discoverability and visual clarity.
  • Organizational tools: Move, duplicate, delete, rename actions for content management.
  • Sharing workflows: Iteratively designed based on research to make sharing intuitive.
  • Seamless export: Enabled educators to integrate content into external teaching tools.
Deferred Features:

A modern presentation builder, previously unsupported by Artstor, was scoped for future development due to MVP constraints.

JSTOR + Artstor

Next Steps and Learnings

This project taught me the importance of:

  • Combining research insights with practical design solutions.
  • Respecting user investment and habits, even when building a new platform.
  • Prioritizing small, high-impact improvements that build trust and adoption.

By centering workflows, improving manageability, and meeting users where they were, we successfully transitioned a deeply invested user base onto a modern, integrated research platform.