Digital Library Prototype Website

[ Technologies > Proof of Concept > Prototype > Pilot > Production ]

Prototyping

This Prototyping project was undertaken as part of our Innovation Lab Services. The project was an important part a larger programme of work to digitise a large corporate library containing thousands of historical newspaper, media clippings, and company annual & interim reports, and make them accessible and searchable via a corporate intranet.

With an earlier Proof of Concept project completed to confirm technical feasibility of the WordPress platform, in this engagement we designed and implemented a prototype document library within WordPress to simulate a sizeable part of the system and to help build confidence in the intended digital solution.

Content Management

Whilst WordPress itself is relatively straightforward for hosting simple websites, our client specifically wanted to use its content management capabilities to store an online digital library of thousands of PDF files and other media types (video, audio), make them searchable, and provide the user with the ability to filter documents in situ using keyword searching and being able to filter on several fields (e.g., country of origin, publisher, date range, author, document type etc).

The above image shows an early example of the UI where a number of filters were applied to the library to locate a specific newspaper article.

User Experience (UX)

With the documents already scanned into a large library of searchable Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files, and stored within a hierarchy of folders, the website was developed to quickly build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to better understand the User Experience (UX design).

Using feedback from our target user group, we were then able to iterate over several MVP enhancements to provide a more focused and positive user experience.

User Interface (UI) inputs and technical solution enhancements

The MVP also allowed the team to confirm technical functionality underpinning the highly dynamic User Interface (UI) of the website running on the WordPress platform and deploy associated third-party add-ins/plug-ins where functionality was found to be inadequate.

End Results

This engagement allowed our client to design and prototype a MVP in order to simulate the target solution and to allow iterative UX feedback within an accelerated time frame of several weeks.