Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the flagship magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. The publication is distributed worldwide among 100,000 professional and student members from the fields of computing and information technology. Online, the CACM website covers topical research, news, opinion, and the practical application of emerging trends in computer technology. Visitors can also access the ACM Digital Library, a premier electronic database of scholarly research and CACM’s archived back issues.

In 2020, ACM announced a bold initiative: to open up all of its content to the public, not just paying members. As part of this work, ACM sought to transform the monthly, print-based CACM into a digital-first publication paired with a modern website that would dramatically improve internal workflow and make it easier for visitors to find specific content. Additionally, the site had to meet accessibility standards, be responsive across all devices, and be built upon open source software (in this case, WordPress).

 
To successfully realize the next generation of the CACM website, Alley needed to understand publishing workflows across ACM and provide services in a range of areas: information architecture, UX design, data migration, custom development, and audience research.

Building a digital-first workflow 

For CACM, digital-first meant reworking their publishing workflow. Before our partnership, CACM compiled their print magazine first and then released that edition’s articles to the website. Today, as articles are approved, CACM can publish the content to their website and their digital library simultaneously. The magazine is then compiled, maybe months later, with these pre-existing articles. This digital-first approach means articles can be released one at a time while they are still timely, months faster than they could when CACM‘s content was first printed in the magazine.

Migrating and managing scholarly, technical content

A significant portion of CACM’s content is scholarly scientific literature and they follow the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), an XML format that provides elements and attributes for describing textual and graphical content online. This meant our design and migration work needed to account for significant amounts of metadata, including footnotes, references, and volume and issue information. It was imperative that this information be retained across online and print formats.

To achieve this, we built a custom xml parser that would respect the rules of the JATS standard, interpret them, and convert articles to accessible html for publishing on the web. We worked closely with our partners on the VIP platform team to make sure everything we needed to parse XML within CMS was available at the platform level.

CACM‘s content frequently features complex mathematical representations as figures within the text. These figures are authored in LaTeX and converted to MathML, which is rendered in the browser with the help of MathJax to ensure that they remain aesthetically pleasing, readable, and accessible to CACM‘s readers.

Member Authentication

We built a member authentication system that ties into ACM’s membership database. This allows ACM members to log into the site and receive additional benefits like commenting access and the ability to customize the homepage by selecting favorite topics.

Wayfinding

As our developers worked to make content publishing more fluid, other team members partnered with CACM to propose new site architecture that would dramatically reduce the number of topics presented on the website. Having fewer, broader bucket entry points would reduce cognitive load and quickly communicate the topics CACM covers. Our designers proposed new block-based templates for key pages like the homepage that reflected a new hierarchy of information based on readers’ needs.

Design

Our team dramatically improved the site’s look and feel by introducing new fonts, colors, layouts, and imagery. The site is now more modern and looks great at all resolutions, from mobile to desktop.

Approach

We eschewed a waterfall approach to our work. Rather than waiting until CACM had completed their portion of the publishing workflow to begin our own work on content ingestion, we built a prototype that was ready to go the moment CACM could send content our way. To stay coordinated and facilitate communication, we took an agile approach to our work, demoing our progress to the CACM team weekly. In this way, they could see the site progressively come to life and provide ongoing feedback throughout the process.

Now that the CACM site is live, we continue to support the magazine team by adding new features to further simplify their publishing workflow— automatically grouping content into issues when the magazine is ready to be published and supporting new fields that CACM has added to their XML files to streamline article production for their editorial staff.