UX

Cooperative Design
Part 1: Finding a Common Language in the Gale Product Suite

| By Gabe & the User Experience Team | Since 1954, Gale’s mission has been to empower learners and serve libraries with the tools their patrons need. In that time, our suite of products has expanded to meet the evolving needs of the research and education market. We now manage over 160 digital products and … Read more

Assessing the User Experience on Gale Products

|By Heather Hedden | As senior vocabulary editor, I’ve worked on editing the Gale Subject thesaurus since we’ve had a web interface for our databases in the late 1990s, and there have been so many changes since then. The web user interface of Gale database products is key to making the research databases usable and … Read more

A New Gale.com Experience!

By Thomas Piggott

Home Page Screenshot
The new Gale.com homepage with reorganized navigation. Click to enlarge or visit the website.

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.

Read moreA New Gale.com Experience!

21 Voices, Predictive Findability, and What Have Your Students Taught You Lately

By Daniel Marano

At Gale and Cengage Learning, we conduct hundreds of user studies in any given year. In each study, we talk to and observe dozens of users as we iteratively design or modify our resources and tools. We have been doing and learning from this user-centered design approach for years now, and have a centralized user experience department that conducts this research for the entire organization.

What this traditional form of user-centered design leaves out, however, are certain types of longitudinal data, and the evolving habits and technologies that a student moves through over time. That’s why last year we launched a novel new research study called 21 Voices.

Read more21 Voices, Predictive Findability, and What Have Your Students Taught You Lately

Gale Artemis: Literary Sources and Literature Criticism Online Update

Presents came early for some of your favorite literature resources. As of December 18, the ability to browse the entire volume from ‘About this Publication’ page for all Literature Criticism Online (LCO) series in Gale Artemis: Literary Sources and LCO has been added. The default “Search within publication” will now be within the particular volume instead of the entire series. This change will yield better, more focused results.

After clicking the What’s Inside link, you can find your library’s databses within LCO to locate specific volumes:

Read moreGale Artemis: Literary Sources and Literature Criticism Online Update