* Sophie Allen <[log in to unmask]> [2019-11-12 11:00]:
> We are pleased to announce the following 5 publishers have made it
> to the next stage of our new 'Best publisher user experience
> award [...]
>   *   Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Core<http://www.cambridge.org/core>
>   *   Emerald Publishing: Emerald Insight<https://www.emerald.com/insight/>

Seriously? For the purpose of this list that should also and
specifically take into account the IDP Discovery Service (integration)
where I find it hard to believe the above 2 are among the "best 5" --
even considering the abysmal state of affairs in the industry[1].

* Cambridge implements roughly 3 well-known anti-patterns:
  * Terminology ("Log in via Shibboleth or Athens"), though that's
    lessened somewhat by prefixing it: "With your institutional details"
  * The old, unmaintained Shibboleth CDS software asks to select a
    country/federation before you can pick your institution.
  * Ibid.: If selecting "All Sites" in the "Federation" box the list
    of organisations is not sorted in any useful manner: It starts
    with all Japanese institutions in latinised alphabetical order,
    then goes on to list all Indian institutions in latinised
    alphabetical order, then starts again at A with German institution, etc.
    I.e., the sites are presented in alphabetical order *per* *federation*
    *but* the federations themselfs are bogus-sorted.
    (Finally there's also offered a search, which is necessary
    considering all of the above.)
  * Also it offers all IDPs it knows via (inter-)federation for login
    including those that cannot possibly work (because the IDP does
    not belong to / represent a subscriber, or isn't even a real
    organisation such as a federation's public test IDP). That adds noise
    to the UI and makes institutional selection more difficult, IMHO.

* Emerald's new Discovery Interface (now at liblynx.com) also leaves a
  lot to be desired:
  * They only offer a search-based interface and that doesn't offer
    auto-complete / search-as-you-type. (At least that search interface
    has meanwhile been sped up to acceptable levels, a few months ago
    every search took 4-5 seconds before any results were being
    displayed.)
  * That search interface simply *doesn't* *find* roughly 25% of their
    subscribing customers from our federation, no matter what you
    search for. Can't get any worse wrt discovery, IMO.
  * In at least one case the institution can be found but when
    selecting it turns out it's actually /another/ institution (one
    that's not even a subscriber, AFAIK), i.e., you're being sent to
    the *wrong* institution. Probably on par with not finding the
    subscribing institution, as far as worst possible errors go.
  * Most of the institution names are somewhat maimed or presented in
    completely inconsistent ways, instead of e.g. relying on the
    federation-supplied, normalised display names. Some institution
    names ARE IN ALL CAPS, others are not. Most have broken umlauts by
    having umlauts replaced with the base character, "ä" -> "a",
    others by using transcription convensions "ä" -> "ae". Some are
    only shown with their English-language name, others only with
    their German-language name. Some can be found using
    German-language terms or names but then will only be shown in
    English, e.g. searching for "fh ober" will return "University of
    Applied Sciences Upper Austria" (which is correct, but highly
    unintuitive). None can be found with "Vienna" but only using the
    city's  German-language name ("Wien") -- with some publishers it's
    the other way around, of course. Some display names contain
    company type information ("GmbH", the local type of an LLC), some
    don't. Some have the German-language equivalent of "library" in
    the display name, some don't, etc. -- In short: It's a complete mess.

If that's really "the best" and possibly even worthy of being awarded
for it then the general state of affairs in this industry must be even
worse than I thought (if that's even possible).

N.B.: I have not looked at any other aspects beyond the IDP Discovery
Service (e.g. "get article"-type flows from deep links, etc.).
The above results are all easily discoverable within a few minutes of
trying to use either of the interfaces, armed with only a list of
institutions to search for.

Best regards,
-peter

[1] As evidenced by the need for and almost universal lack of adoption
    of https://discovery.refeds.org/  Whether https://ra21.org and
    seamlessaccess.org will fare better remains to be seen.

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