Given the recent radio silence on the Kudos blog, you might be forgiven for thinking we were #AFA ("Away for August"). Not so! We've been hard at work redeveloping our web tools to make it easier for academics and their institutions and publishers to increase the reach and impact of their publications. Our crack team of user experience specialists have focussed on optimizing the architecture and design of key parts of www.growkudos.com, including publication and author 'home' pages, and the all-important dashboards.
Our dashboards contain a wealth of metrics that help authors to understand which publications are attracting most interest, and to see at a glance where they could best invest more effort in explaining and sharing their work. With so much information to convey, we are constantly trying to improve the way it is displayed to make it intuitive to navigate and easy to action. If you've ever used some of the free analytics tools out there, you'll know that it's one thing to have lots of data at your disposal; it's quite another to be able to extract insight from that data such that you can quickly and easily know what to do next.
That's why we're all very excited by our forthcoming designs. They feel fresh, and a lot of the functionality they are enabling is unique to Kudos - yet by employing "modern classic" design features they also feel familiar, and it's easy to feel your way through the available information. Our focus on information-to-insight is epitomized by the new improve-my-performance area: it makes the most of authors' limited time by pointing them to those activities that will best pay back any effort invested, by distilling all the data into a to-do list of suggested actions and quick-linking them straight into each task.
This step change complements developments that many of our publisher partners are making. Together, we're architecting new workflows to maximize the impact of authors' work, built on established processes and relationships related to manuscript submission, editing, sales and readership. Using data-generated insights to help authors see the effect of explaining and sharing their work more widely is the core of the Kudos vision, and it's thrilling to see our website designs continue to evolve such that the more sophisticated and ambitious aspects of our vision are now becoming a reality. We're looking forward to these designs going live later this year, and will post here to let you know when you can check them out for yourselves!
