Redesign submission lists to improve submission tracking and discovery

[NateWr]

Summary

Describe the problem you would like to solve

Editors spend a lot of time using the submissions list to manage submissions and other editorial assignments. To do their work more quickly, they want the lists to show more information, provide more tools to find submissions, take actions more quickly, and distinguish between different assignments.

Describe the solution you'd like
Redesign the submission lists to accomodate more information and support a UI framework that can grow over time to include more features.

Who is asking for this feature?
This is a longstanding community priority. See further details below.

Motivating Issues

• Tracking submissions in the review stage Add review assignment details and progress tracking to submission lists #4172, Add filters to track submissions within the review stage #7488
• Distinguishing between editor, author and reviewer assignments Separate editorial, review and author assignments in submissions lists #4975
• Requests for more filters Add filter to see submissions by language #5263, Add filter to see submissions overdue by X days #7489 that have made the filter list large and unwieldy
• Allow common editorial actions to be taken directly from the submissions list Allow editors and editorial assistants to be assigned from the submissions list #7490, Allow editors to assign reviewers from the submissions list #7491
• Separate declined and published submissions Separate declined and published submissions #7494
• Unable to use submissions lists on small screens

Proposal

@Devika008 has created the following mockups and conducted extensive user research and testing. The final details may continue to evolve, but the broad proposal should be considered final.

1. A new submissions dashboard for editors with more details and additional views to help editors track submissions.

2. A summary panel that can be opened with more details and actions for each submission.

Further mockups are available in the different issues below

Issues

This is a major undertaking scheduled for the 3.5 milestone. As such a large feature, we have broken it down into smaller issues. These have been further split into critical and optional issues.

Critical Issues

These issues must be completed in the 3.5 milestone in order to migrate from the old submissions list to the new submissions list.

• Implement new backend UI layout for submission lists #8879
• Implement table-based submissions list with many views #8880
• Add review assignment progress and pop-ups to submissions table #8881
• Improve how submissions are filtered in new submission lists  #8882
• Add a summary panel to the submissions list #8883
• New design for pagination component #8884
• REST API should return more information about submission editorial activity #8885
• Add REST API endpoint to get information about each review assignment #8886
• Extend submissions REST API to support views and view counts #8887
• Separate editorial, review and author assignments in submissions lists #4975

Optional Issues (in order of priority)

These issues are optional, but many are high value. We hope at least some of them can be completed for 3.5. These are ranked in order of priority, based on user research to determine what would be most useful. The top issues should be worked on first.

1. Allow submissions to be ordered by stage #8888
2. Show last activity in submission summary panel #8889
3. Show assigned editors in the submission summary panel #8890
4. Show review assignments in submission summary panel #8891
5. Show issue assignment in summary panel #8892
6. Allow submissions to be sorted by the number of days in stage #8893
7. Allow editors and assistants to be assigned from the submissions summary panel #8894
8. Allow editors to read reviews and assign and unassign reviewers from the submission summary panel #8895
9. Allow editors to read and reply to discussions in the submission summary panel #8896
10. Allow editors to export the submissions table to a CSV file #8897
11. Create avatars from user profile images #8899
12. Add a form field in the profile section that allows users to customize the initials displayed in their profile avatars. #10489

Original Proposal

The mockups above and in the linked issues were compiled after extensive user research. They are an evolution of an original proposal from 2021.

Original Proposal

The video below introduces proposed mockups that bring together feature requests and proposals from several other issues into a single, coherent design. However, they are just proposals. No decisions have yet been made about the precise design of the new submissions lists or how it will operate.

Video walkthrough of proposals

List View

The following mockup shows a proposal for a list-based view of submissions. The list-based view is easy to adapt to small screens, but it is harder to fit lots of information on the screen and even harder for a plugin to add its own information.

Table View

The following mockup shows a proposal for a table-based view of submissions. The table view allows plugins to easily add/remove columns. However, extra work would need to be done to ensure it worked on small screens.

The columns shown here are suggestions. Which columns are shown will depend on how important they are. It may even be possible to let users configure which columns they see.

Mobile View

The following mockup shows a simplified view for mobile phones. The dropdown toggle would expand more complete details for each submission.

Groups instead of separate lists

Instead of having separate tabs for different submission lists (My Queue, All Active, Archived), the new submission list will only have a single list. The user can view one of the following groups at a time:

Group	Description
Assigned to me	Same as "My Queue"
All Active	No change
Unassigned	No change
Scheduled for Publication	Any submissions with the scheduled for publication status. In OJS this is a submission scheduled for publication in an issue that is not yet published.
Published	Published submissions
Declined	Declined submisssions
Incomplete	Incomplete submissions. Incomplete submissions should only show in this group and not appear in any other groups.

Filter Groups

The number of filters has gotten pretty large. The new list should organise these filters into dropdowns so they are easier to find and use.

A filter group can be expanded to show the filters in it.

Review Assignments

The new lists can show more details about the review stage. See more detailed mockups at #4172.

Quick Actions and Details

In the List View, each submission will expand to show further actions and information.

In the Table View, more of the information and actions are shown in each row. However, additional information and actions is available through the Edit button.

[ajnyga]

This is an additional comment that came up in a working group at the Helsinki Sprint:

Incomplete submissions currently show to the Editor within the All Active list. This causes unnecessary ‘noise’ within the submission list, where the editor is presented with article data that has not actually been submitted to the journal. This adds unnecessary content to the submission list and makes it harder for the Editor to find their tasks.

Describe the solution you'd like
Remove the Incomplete submissions from the default All Active list so that an editor does not see them each time they enter the list.

The Incomplete submissions should still be available via the ‘Incomplete’ filter option, should an editor need to access them.