Ubiquity Repositories
Designing a SaaS institutional repository platform for researchers and academics.
The institutional repository space lacked modern, user-friendly platforms. Existing solutions suffered from poor typographic hierarchy, cluttered interfaces, and limited customization — leaving repository managers and researchers without intuitive tools to preserve and discover research materials.
A 0-to-1 design of the platform with streamlined search and exploration flows, institutional branding customization, intuitive filtering, and support across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
The platform was adopted by major institutions including the British Library and Pacific University, and more viewable below.
The Story, Abridged
At the beginning, my partner and I kicked off the project with a competitive analysis of institutional repositories & their different providers. We diagnosed some clear problems with what was on the market: typographic hierarchy was a near-universal weak point, leaving pages feeling cluttered and hard to scan. Competitors that stood out did so by surfacing impact metrics like citations and visitor counts — important to the academics producing these works — in a clear way.
From conducting interviews with repository managers and researchers across the world, two needs came up consistently: the ability to apply institution-specific branding (most platforms offered none, producing nearly-identical experiences), and filtering that was actually intuitive — users were routinely wading through thousands of results with difficulty.
We mapped user journeys around two primary flows: searching for a particular work, and exploring the contents of the repository without a specific work in mind. The home page needed to surface impact metrics and make the repository's identity legible at a glance, while search results needed to be easy to sift through with low-friction filtering. Work pages needed to make research impact visible alongside abstracts and metadata, and author pages needed to make researcher profiles genuinely discoverable.
Iterative testing with users and stakeholders along the way led to some changes: search moved to a prominent position after the home page read too much like a university homepage, and we learned that author pages should be a configurable feature — museums had no use for them while research institutions, whose users were rightfully invested in their own career growth and repuation, found htem essential.
