Working on xpub

Much is going on in the Coko world at the moment and a lot of news coming out soon about various collaborations. Much of the attention has been around xpub, the journal system we have been working on built on top of PubSweet.

PubSweet is, of course, a component based system so you can ‘roll your own’ journal or book platform from existing components. We are making a lot of components for both Editoria and xpub and publishing them for reuse with an open source (MIT) license.

Some of the components we are generating for xpub are coming out of the work we are doing with Collabra, the UCP Psychology Journal. Today the Managing Editor, Dan Morgan, and I met for another session working out the logic of the components and how they fit together.

We started by working through the flow from the perspectives of each of the major stakeholders – Managing Editor, Senior Editor, Handling Editor, Author, Reviewer. We worked out what they each needed to see on the dashboard and then went through their workflow and what they needed from each component.

We then took each of these small mappings and transferred them to larger pieces of paper. Drawing the interfaces in basic form.

Each of the diagrams are detailed below.

We had already worked out this structure. Today was about running through the logic from each actor’s point of view. Good news is, the logic held up and validated the architecture. Good news! So, what you see in these pics is more or less what we will build. It is a thin horizontal slice that covers the complete lifecycle of a manuscript going through the Collabra process. We’ll build it and test it, and then layer on additional functionality.

Next I’ll recreate these in digital graphics and add a page of bullet points for explanation. We will then meet with the Coko team and talk it through and start building! It’s a good way to design systems, way better than endless months gathering pages and pages of product requirements. It’s a lightweight and fun process. Software is a conversation after all!