The aim of the TRIPLE project (https://www.gotriple.eu/ ) is to help social sciences and humanities (SSH) research in Europe to gain visibility, to be more efficient and effective, to improve its reuse within the SSH and beyond, and to dramatically increase its societal impact. As part of this aim, we are designing a new ‘Discovery’ platform for SSH scholars and other interested stakeholders to enable them to access relevant research publications, find other scholars and to find data for possible re-use. To ensure the new platform (named GoTriple) meets the needs of its users we have been involving stakeholders in our research activities from the very start of the project. This work sits in wider co-design activities of the Triple project which will also include innovative services such as visual searches, annotation, a recommender system, new ways to connect with researchers and other stakeholders and also crowdfunding functionality. This paper describes how, in spite of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we have reached out to stakeholders and conducted co-design activities with them to gain a better understanding of their working practices and to find how the various functionalities of the GoTriple platform could best support them. We will discuss the evolution of the co-design / co-creation process and the practical use of the methodology undertaken with researchers and other end-users to inform the development process. The focus of this work was to understand SSH researchers' discovery journey and to see where the GoTriple platform could support their discovery processes. To do this we have utilised a two-pronged approach, one method to investigate what researchers tell us about their discovery journey (by having them map this in an online workshop session using Miro), and a second method to record their discovery process in a Cognitive Walkthrough task, where the researcher talks the workshop co-ordinator through the process as they do it in a recorded online session, the process is then mapped by the researcher afterwards to enable a comparison. We have modified a mapping methodology described by (Bødker, Lyle, & Saad-Sulonen, 2017) who used paper stickers of technology artefacts to ‘map’ the technological interactions within a volunteer community, using the same approach but in a digital setting using the whiteboard tool Miro. This dual approach (Mapping + Walkthrough) was decided upon as although the workshop ‘mapping’ was very informative and gave a very good visual overview of the process, we were concerned that sometimes what people say they do does not always reflect what they actually do. By conducting research using both methods, we can make a comparison and check to see if there are any major differences. The results will inform the developers about current practices and identify any pain points where GoTriple may be able to provide a smoother discovery process for researchers and other stakeholders. We have been working closely with our Interface designer and our results will help to inform the new GoTriple platform (a first prototype will be available in September 2021 which would coincide nicely with the conference).

{"references": ["B\u00f8dker, S., Lyle, P., & Saad-Sulonen, J. (2017). Untangling the mess of technological artifacts: Investigating community artifact ecologies. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, Part F1285, 246\u2013255. https://doi.org/10.1145/3083671.3083675"]}