By Thomas Piggott
Gale.com is changing! We’re proud to announce a new and improved experience, with even more to come as we continue to make updates.
Hi, I’m Thomas Piggott, the User Experience Designer for Gale.com. I wanted to be the first to introduce you to some of the new features of the website, along with providing a peek into what’s to come.
Gaining a Better Understanding
At Gale, our goal is to empower libraries and learners by partnering with you. About a year ago, we began thinking about how our website could help us live up to that goal. We delved into understanding what capabilities the site needed in order to make your life easier. We collected feedback from interviews with more than 40 customers around the world and held discussions with our sales representatives and customer success managers who know what you ask for the most.
As we move through this process, we’ll continue to connect with our customers at trade shows, with online surveys and field interviews to better understand our needs and further improve your experience when visiting gale.com.
The Fresh Look
The first thing you’ll notice is a new look for our homepage, blog and Primary Sources product line. This modern look is just the beginning of Gale’s new brand direction, which will begin to roll out across all channels soon. We also wanted to rethink how we categorize our products and help you find the products most relevant to you, which starts with our Primary Sources product line. The search experience is now much quicker and includes a number of filters specific to those products, such as language of the content, geographic region, and the specific disciplines covered. Once you select a product, the information available is far more thorough than before. We’re getting you the information you need the most, like fact sheets, title lists, screenshots of the content and product interfaces, and trial offers for you and your institution.
Future Improvements
While a lot of your feedback is already being put to use, we still have a lot of work to do. The improvements to our Primary Sources products will extend to all of our products early next year. From there, we plan to improve the purchasing experience, support site, trials, and My Account.
We’re excited about what’s already been done and even more excited about what’s to come. As you use the site, please let us know what you think including aspects of the site that work well and aspects that could be improved. There’s a feedback link at the top right of all pages or you leave your comments below.
Gale.com will become your centralized spot for all things Gale. Check out the new site!
About the Author
Thomas is a Senior User Experience Designer at Cengage Learning and has been working with Gale to redesign the website experience. He loves traveling and has designs on making his way to all 7 continents with Africa, Australia, South America, and Antartica still on his list.