Silverchair’s User Experience (UX) team touches virtually every aspect of the product development lifecycle and is with each project from inception through to launch. UX collaborates with back-end developers and client stakeholders on all of the product’s design elements, from user interactions to the underlying front-end architecture.
Design, usability, and discoverability are critical and intertwined parts of an effective platform, so our team stays at the cutting edge of best practices to deliver that value to our clients. Our interfaces have been iteratively designed based on years of research with scholarly and professional users, with enough flexibility built in to reflect your unique brand and distinguish you in the market.
Research-Driven Design
- Years of user research with scholarly and professional audiences inform every design decision we make
- Our UX team continuously studies how researchers discover content, how editors manage complex workflows, and how institutions navigate access and administration
- Recent initiatives like ScholarOne Gateway and Dynamic Discovery emerged directly from understanding friction points in the research experience and designing solutions that remove barriers
- On average, 60-75% of our platform releases are client-led, generated from publisher investments, ideas, and community feedback
Accessibility & Standards
- Accessibility is embedded in the Silverchair Platform’s foundation with AA WCAG 2.1 compliance instilled into our platform’s codebase
- We are actively engaged in understanding and developing the Platform to comply with evolving guidance like WCAG 2.2 and the European Accessibility Act
- In 2025 alone, we invested over 2,000 development hours on front-end and back-end accessibility enhancements to ensure sustainability and accessibility
- Our commitment extends beyond compliance to genuine usability, ensuring that researchers of all abilities can fully engage with scholarly content
What our clients are saying
Modern, Responsive Design
- Our fully responsive front-end architecture delivers consistent, high-quality experiences across smartphones, tablets, and desktops
- Interfaces are built with contemporary web standards and progressive enhancement principles
- We design with a mobile-first approach, recognizing that scholarly work increasingly happens across contexts and devices
- Responsive design extends to complex interactions including article viewing, search refinement, and administrative tools
Flexible Branding & Customization
- Publishers need platforms that feel distinctly theirs while maintaining sophisticated functionality
- Our design framework gives publishers the flexibility to express their unique brand identity and distinguish themselves in the market
- Whether you’re a learned society with deep institutional heritage or an innovative startup publisher, our interfaces adapt to reflect your organization’s character
- This balance between consistency and customization allows publishers to deliver cohesive experiences across diverse content types—from traditional journals to multimedia collections, video content, and emerging formats
Continuous Innovation
The Silverchair Platform evolves through regular releases every three weeks, allowing us to respond quickly to changing user needs and technological advances. Our UX team works iteratively, testing and refining based on both quantitative data and qualitative feedback from our publisher community, ensuring that design improvements emerge from real-world use cases and direct partnership with publishers.
See all this & more in action in our client case studies.