AAAS Science & Diplomacy Magazine

The need

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has a magazine called Science & Diplomacy. As the title says, its mission is to engage the scientific community in diplomacy.

When the magazine moved online in 2011, the original website was structured like a traditional monthly print magazine. By the time the current staff was given a budget to update the site in 2022, its look was very dated and the staff felt it didn’t represent the professionalism of AAAS.

The site also contained important content that was hard for the reader to find, such as information on the organization itself, how to participate, and how to donate.

The back-end system the Science & Diplomacy staff used to create the magazine was very difficult to use. Most of the articles had footnotes, which were a nightmare for the staff to get looking right. 

The original developers who created the site no longer worked at AAAS, which meant the web staff had no support for maintaining a coherent information architecture when they wanted changes. They simply bolted new functions onto the original design. This led to a confusing array of content types that were difficult to work with.

The site was also built on Drupal 7, an outdated version of the content management system.

AAAS issued a Request for Proposal for a site re-design and CoLab won the contract.

Melissa Rosenthal, a Lead Program Manager for AAAS, was CoLab’s technical partner in the project. She said, “We’d worked with CoLab before, and with all the previous projects, CoLab had stuck to the budget and schedule. And on this project, the budget was very, very tight.

“We’ve loved everybody we’ve worked with at CoLab; they’re low key and professional. So we felt comfortable awarding them the contract.”

The discovery collaboration

Together, CoLab and Melissa’s team decided it made the most sense to create a new site from scratch in Drupal 10, the most current version. This was the first time AAAS had created a site in Drupal 10; the rest of their sites were migrated to Drupal 10 from earlier versions.

CoLab recommended a discovery phase, in which we would work with the editorial staff to understand who their audiences were, and how to create a simple user journey so each type of visitor could find what they needed.

The editorial staff were our primary clients. They didn’t have a lot of technical knowledge, which was fine. We’re experienced at using plain English to describe how clients might reorganize their content. The editorial staff didn’t need to know the technologies we would use to get the result they wanted.

Although we had to work within the AAAS brand guidelines, which are fairly corporate looking, we saw opportunities to create a more up-to-date visual design, so we recommended a redesign phase.

Most importantly for AAAS, we agreed to create a back-end content management system that was flexible and easy for staff to use. This would allow for them to move away from the outdated notion of a static monthly issue and create special issues on related topics.

What we built

In the past, AAAS technical staff and CoLab developers had worked together as one team. We call these Team Augmentation projects, and Melissa had appreciated them, because it gave her more junior developers a chance to learn from CoLab’s more senior people.

In this case, however, CoLab did all the design, development, and quality assurance testing.

During the discovery phase, we determined that the Science & Diplomacy staff didn’t need all the existing content types, so we created a new information architecture that streamlined them.

CoLab created a new visual identity and then developed the site, customizing the back-end system to accommodate all the ways the Science & Diplomacy staff needed to use it. Including the pesky footnotes.

Within the streamlined content types, CoLab created new features at the staff’s request, such as conversations with authors, a featured article block, and author profiles that linked to articles by the same contributor.

The budget didn’t allow for CoLab to migrate the archive of articles from the old site to the new; Melissa and her team of three had to do it themselves. So CoLab provided them with a spreadsheet of all the articles that needed migration, and whenever any of the AAAS team had a moment, they would migrate an article and tick it off the list. In this way, migration actually finished ahead of schedule.

CoLab also created documentation and training for the editorial staff.

The result

“The staff are ecstatic”, said Melissa. “Their workload has decreased; it takes them a lot less time to publish content, because instead of a regular, monthly issue, they do special issues. They decide it’ll be on a certain topic, and then they just tag a series of articles to create the issue.”