It’s an exciting time at ORCID, and I’m very happy to have joined the team as Senior Communications Manager! At the time of this writing over 7.2 million ORCID iDs have been registered and, according to our recent Community Survey, our users no longer consider us to be a maturing organization. We understand that, as we grow, so does our responsibility to understand and address the needs of our community, and make sure you have easy access to the information you need about ORCID. This includes optimizing the user experience with more intuitive navigation and content layout, improving accessibility, and establishing a process for collecting and responding to your feedback.
Prioritizing user needs
My first project – a refresh of the ORCID website – is one of the ways we are addressing this. Website content typically has a 7-10 year life span and orcid.org was launched in 2012, so now is a good time to revisit it.
The ORCID Registry user interface (not included in this project) is built to meet the needs of researchers. However, with the exception of the ORCID blog, our other websites (orcid.org and, in particular, members.orcid.org) are primarily designed to provide individuals at organizations (members and non-members) with the information you need about us. Who we are, what we do, how we do it, and — most importantly — why.
Faster site, more usable content
Our website refresh will, therefore, include inventorying current content and repurposing/ rewriting/ reorganizing it for maximum usefulness and accessibility. Whether you are a funder, publisher, research institution, consortium, or researcher, we understand your time is limited – and valuable! – so we will strive to ensure you can find and digest information relevant to you in the shortest time possible. This will be an ongoing process and we welcome your feedback to help us along the way (see below for details).
In addition to streamlining the content, we will be working on the user experience (UX) to make finding your way around the site more intuitive. As our UX Designer Mallory Robertson mentioned in her Improving the User Experience: Why, What, How?, you can expect a new homepage design as well as improved page layout and menus, among other changes. In fact, you may have already noticed an update to the menus recently as a first step to making the site easier to navigate.
Help us help you: we welcome your ideas!
Our website refresh goals are simple yet ambitious: make it effortless for members to understand the value of ORCID and implement it in your systems and workflows, and for researchers to understand the benefits of having and using an ORCID iD.
We expect to launch the new site in early 2020 and we’d love you to get involved!
- Share your input on what you’d like to see on the new site
- Participate in our usability testing. It’s a simple 10-minute online test that will allow us to measure how well we did in presenting information in a way that makes it easy for users to find what they need on our site.
As ORCID grows in maturity, we are looking at new ways to ensure you can easily find the information you need about our organization. We’re incredibly grateful to have such an engaged community and we look forward to working with you as we develop our updated website presence, and to sharing our progress with you as we approach launch. Stay tuned!