JSTOR has launched a new Labs team charged with partnering with the community to seek out new opportunities and refine and validate them through experimentation. The JSTOR Labs team has been using Flash Builds – high-intensity, short-burst, user-driven development efforts – in order to prototype new ideas and get to a user saying “Wow” in as little as a week. In this talk, I’ll describe how we’ve done this using two case studies, JSTOR Snap and Understanding Shakespeare. In doing so, I’ll highlight the skills, tools and content that help us to learn – and therefore get to innovation – faster.

1. USER-DRIVEN
INNOVATION:
LEARNING FASTER
WITH FLASH BUILDS
17 March 2015
Alex Humphreys, JSTOR Labs
@abhumphreys
ALPSP Seminar:
Disruption, Development and Divestment

2. JSTOR is a not-for-profit
digital library of academic
journals, books, and primary
sources.
Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit
research and consulting service
that helps academic, cultural,
and publishing communities
thrive in the digital
environment.
Portico is a not-for-profit
preservation service for digital
publications, including
electronic journals, books, and
historical collections.
ITHAKA is a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic
community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record
and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

3. A new-ish team at ITHAKA
Mission: to seek out new concepts and
opportunities, to refine and to
validate them through research and
experimentation.
Among our methods: Flash Builds*
(or a version of them)
* We first heard of Flash Builds from Marty Cagan, describing the work of the Nordstrom Innovation Lab.

4. CASE STUDY #1:
JSTOR SNAP

5. ONE WEEK IN ANN ARBOR…
https://vimeo.com/120185616

6. THE FINISHED PROTOTYPE
http://labs.jstor.org/snap

7. CASE STUDY #2:
UNDERSTANDING
SHAKESPEARE

8. PARTNERSHIP W/ FOLGER
Folger Shakespeare Library
• Folger Digital Texts
• Shakespeare Quarterly
• Scholars and students
Objective: demonstrate the
value of Folger Digital Texts to
scholars and students and
demonstrate how it can be
cross-referenced with
Shakespeare Quarterly.
JSTOR
• The full archive run of SQ
• 2000+ other journals
• A newly-formed Labs team
Objective: validate the value of
using a primary text as a portal
into secondary literature.

9. THE FINISHED PROTOTYPE
http://labs.jstor.org/shakespeare

10. THE RECIPE

11. • A small, diverse team
with technical, design and
business skills
• The ability to show work
to users early and often
with the whole team present
• A space to innovate:
- Flexible technology that
allows for componentization
and continuous deployment
- A safe-space to fail
- Time to focus
THE
INGREDIENTS
Space to
Innovate
Image source:
http://uxtraordinary.com/venn-pie-agram/

12. Prior to the Flash Build:
1. Interviews with scholars
2. Create the data & infrastructure
During the Flash Build
3. Design jam
4. Paper prototypes
5. Low-fi prototypes
6. Working Site
After the Flash Build
7. Polish & clean up
8. Release & measure
THE
STEPS
Interviews
with scholars
and students
every day
Passive
Learning
Active
Learning

13. THE
RESULTS* You just blew my mind.
If I could, I’d leap through this screen and kiss you.
Wow. Fab resource.
The future is finally now.
* Quotations from users about JSTOR Snap and Understanding Shakespeare taken from direct interviews and Twitter
Just the coolest thing ever.
I just blew a student away showing him this.

14. THANK YOU
Alex Humphreys
Head of JSTOR Labs
ITHAKA
http://labs.jstor.org
@abhumphreys
alex.humphreys@ithaka.org
Further Reading
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
• Business Model Generation,
Osterwalder & Pigneur
• Marty Cagan’s Blog:
http://svpg.com/articles/
• UX for Lean Startups, Laura Klein
• Lean Analytics, Croll & Yoskovitz

15. APPENDIX