Product Achievements
- Our Platform Development Request (PDR) process continued to add value, with 185 requests submitted in 2023. The PDR process makes it easy for publishers on our platform to share feature suggestions and product ideas when an idea sparks, and for Product to in turn prioritize and plan while offering clients a transparent view of submitted ideas and planned projects. So far, 15% of tickets have been delivered (i.e., the request was satisfied), and 25 publishers have engaged with us in this process.
- Out of the 36 publishers on the platform, 25 participated in Publisher Working Groups, which hosted 20 group meetings over the year.
- We also launched an internal Feature Library, which details key features, benefits, and considerations for clients.
- Key features released:
- Standalone Multimedia is a new content type that enables publishers to host diverse media content, such as videos and podcasts, alongside traditional scholarly works, enhancing user engagement and monetization opportunities while providing valuable analytics for strategic insights.
- Invested 2850 hours into SEO and page performance work, resulting in an overall decrease in page load time across the platform.
- Created an internal Accessibility Working Group to create guidelines for each role within Silverchair to consider accessibility at all stages of project work, standardize our accessibility testing toolset and reporting methods, prioritize a backlog of accessibility improvements for the platform, and develop a publisher-facing Web Accessibility Guide. In 2023, investments in accessibility improvements on the platform theme totaled over 600 hours.
- In total, we released 53 named features in 2023, ~60% of which were Autodeploy (meaning that clients received the upgrades automatically, with no action needed on their part). This is in addition to the many client projects, general maintenance, bug fixes, and incremental upgrades throughout the year.
- Built Sensus Impact, our new product launching next month. Sensus Impact is an initiative borne out of a partnership with OUP to demonstrate the impact of funded research, and value of publisher effort and brand, through the aggregation and communication of key bibliometrics facets, displayed in dynamic funder-specific dashboards.
2024 Product Preview
Product's strategy for 2024 focuses on elevating both front-end and back-end user experiences, innovating effectively to continue our growth and high client satisfaction, and reimagining the platform's design to create fresh and modern user experiences. Our work this year will reaffirm our ethos that beautiful design, usability, accessibility, and discoverability are not just features, but the foundation of our platform, driving us to deliver exceptional experiences for researchers and authors.Overall, 2024 is all about making big bets in incremental ways. The work we’re planning for 2024 aims to:
- Improve the user experience for users of both our front-end sites and backend tools
- Help us win new business by continually aligning to market and prospect aspirations
- Incorporate AI in ways big and small to personalize experiences, streamline workflows, and more
- Refresh the platform design to modernize its look and feel, as well as reimagine the on-platform search and discovery experience
- Bring more data into our decision-making processes so we can more easily prioritize and take action on emerging opportunities
Learn more about our 2023 achievements in our retrospective. Want to be the first to hear about new features? Subscribe to our email newsletter. Want to learn more about the platform? Explore details here.