Improving discovery and onboarding across a European research ecosystem
Role
Company
Timeline
Senior Product Designer
European Open Science Cloud
2022-2024
Scope of work
Product discovery · UX strategy · Stakeholder workshops · Information architecture · UX debt reduction · Design system · Agile UX practices · Mentoring
CONTEXT
EOSC is a complex, multi-sided European research platform spanning Marketplace, Portal and Provider Hub, with 475 services, 330 providers and 5M+ research resources.
I joined as the sole Product Designer during the first year, owning work from discovery and research through interaction design, validation and implementation support.
What initially looked like a visual refresh quickly exposed deeper product issues across search, information architecture, metadata, navigation and provider onboarding. Because these areas shared data and logic, changes in one part of the platform affected the others.
A useful dependency became:
provider input → metadata quality → catalogue structure → search & filtering → researcher decision
That made this a system-level product problem rather than a collection of isolated screens.
CHALLENGE
The platform served two very different user groups.
Researchers needed to discover and evaluate specialised services without already understanding EOSC terminology or taxonomy.
Providers needed to submit structured information through complex onboarding flows with domain-specific metadata, validation rules and publication requirements.
The difficulty was that both experiences were connected.
Poor provider input reduced metadata quality. Poor metadata affected filtering and search. Poor discovery made it harder for researchers to understand and compare services.
At the same time, similar interaction problems had evolved differently across Marketplace, Portal and Provider Hub, creating inconsistency and UX debt.
The core challenge became:
How do we make a complex, data-heavy platform easier to use without removing the structure and information the system genuinely requires?
DISCOVERY
I combined qualitative and quantitative research, workflow analysis, usability testing and stakeholder input across the product ecosystem.
A few findings changed the direction significantly.
Researchers tended to approach the platform through goals and research needs, while the product expected them to understand its internal taxonomy first.
For providers, the main issue was not simply form length. Users had to interpret specialist terminology and metadata requirements before understanding how that information would affect publication and discovery.
This led to two key product principles:
1. Introduce complexity progressively
The system genuinely required detailed information, but users did not need to see all of it at once.
2. Treat onboarding and discovery as one connected system
Improving researcher discovery required improving the quality and structure of provider input upstream.
I also challenged a more taxonomy-heavy navigation direction. Making more categories visible would have exposed more of the system, but research suggested it would not improve orientation. Users needed clearer paths based on intent, not more taxonomy to decode.
SOLUTION
For the Marketplace, I redesigned discovery around a clearer progression:
orient → narrow → compare → evaluate
The work included:
search and filtering
information architecture
navigation
service-result hierarchy
metadata presentation
progressive disclosure of specialist information
The goal was to help users move from a broad need to a confident decision without forcing them to understand the whole platform structure upfront.
For Provider Hub, I redesigned onboarding as a more guided product workflow rather than a sequence of forms.
The new approach introduced:
clearer progress and structure
contextual explanations
validation closer to the point of input
better visibility of incomplete states
clearer recovery from missing or invalid data
more consistent patterns across the platform
The objective was not only to reduce friction for providers, but also to improve the quality of data entering the ecosystem.
Because the work spanned several products, I also established a shared design system, reusable interaction patterns and design review practices to reduce inconsistency and make future development easier to scale.
I worked closely with Product, Engineering, partner organisations and European Commission stakeholders, facilitating workshops and resolving dependencies between user needs, technical constraints and organisational requirements.
OUTCOMES
25% increase in marketplace conversion
60% reduction in provider onboarding drop-off
90% positive post-launch feedback
The broader outcome was a change in how the product team approached usability: discovery, metadata and provider contribution were treated as parts of one connected system rather than isolated UX problems.
REFLECTION
The most important lesson was that discovery problems often begin upstream from the search interface.
Improving the researcher experience required understanding how provider input, metadata and platform structure influenced what users could later find and evaluate.
This project shaped how I approach complex products today: not as isolated screens, but as interconnected workflows, data structures and user decisions.
