In collaboration
ECAL
Overview
Swisscovery is Switzerland's national academic library platform — excellent at retrieval when you already know what you seek. This project asks how design researchers, whose work is exploratory and interdisciplinary, actually experience it — then prototypes a concept that extends it for early, uncertain, cross-disciplinary research.
Service
UX Research
Thematic Analysis
Prototyping
Duration
16 Weeks
The Challenge
Design research often starts vague — you don't yet know the keywords, the field, or how topics connect. There Swisscovery falls short: keyword dependency, information overload, lost search continuity, and no sense of how disciplines relate. It supports research mainly after uncertainty is already reduced. How might it support designers earlier, during open exploration?
The Solution
Qualitative research — six semi-open interviews plus autoethnography, shadowing and process documentation. I open-coded the transcripts, clustered the codes and ran a thematic analysis into five clear themes and key insights, then designed a Guided Exploration concept: theme-based entry instead of keywords, two modes, topics as connected nodes on a knowledge map, recorded research paths and boards that save insights across sessions.
The Result
A guided-exploration concept and knowledge-map prototype, tested through the persona "Anna" — turning academic search into a visual, guided sensemaking process that supports uncertainty and interdisciplinary thinking, while keeping Swisscovery's retrieval strengths.
PORTFOLIO
Knowledge Universe
Knowledge Universe
Knowledge Universe
Interaction Design
AI in Design
Data Visualisation
Prototyping
Barryland Redesign
Barryland Redesign
Barryland Redesign
UX Design
UI Design