Karger Image Explorer (KIE) is a platform giving access to over 250,000 peer-reviewed scientific images. It generates approximately $200,000 USD per year in image re-use permissions revenue, a meaningful income stream tied directly to how easily users can find an image and request permission to reuse it.
The product team had a hunch the permissions journey was broken. My job was to find out exactly where, why, and what to do about it.
I recruited 5 external participants through User Interview: researchers, professors, and medical writers aged 28–50 from the US and Canada, all of whom regularly used peer-reviewed scientific images in their professional work and had no prior familiarity with Karger.
Sessions were conducted remotely and lasted 45 minutes each, combining affordance testing (could users find key elements at all?) with usability testing (could they complete tasks effectively?). I defined three core tasks: search for an image, filter results by open access, and find and click three "Get Permissions" buttons.
Two things stood out consistently across participants.
First, several users instinctively used the main site search bar rather than the Image Explorer's own search. The platform's built-in search was invisible to anyone who hadn't scrolled past the fold, and users were bypassing the core feature entirely without realising it.
Second, when I asked participants to find the "Get Permissions" button, the result was consistent: nobody found it easily. The option was buried inside a "Tools" icon requiring two to three extra clicks to reach. In testing, the only placement that felt intuitive was directly beneath the image, in context, at the moment of intent.
Users weren't discovering the platform's key features. Not because the interface was complex, but because the things that mattered were invisible.
Rather than taking the qualitative findings at face value, I tracked behavior in GA4 across two six-month periods to understand the scale of the problem and to test whether the discoverability issue was real at scale, or specific to our small sample.
The numbers were stark:
The GA4 data didn't contradict the usability findings. It confirmed them at scale. What had looked like a button placement issue in testing was actually a systemic discoverability failure: users weren't finding the search, and the ones who did weren't finding the permissions path.
This matters because proposed quick fixes, like adding a more prominent button to the search results page, would do nothing if users never reached the search results to begin with. The data gave us a way to catch that dead end before building it.
The insight reframed the product conversation. Surface-level fixes were not the answer to a structural problem.
My recommendation was to address discoverability at a higher level:
Move the Image Explorer search above the fold so users don't miss it on landing.
Simplify the page so the core action is immediately clear.
And make the permissions pathway visible at the moment users encounter an image, not buried in a menu they'd need to go looking for.
The goal was to remove the distance between intent and action at every step: finding the tool, finding the image, and licensing it.
What this project reinforced for me is the importance of using data to pressure-test qualitative findings, and to pressure-test proposed solutions before they get built. The usability sessions told us users weren't finding things. The GA4 data told us exactly how many people were affected and confirmed the problem wasn't isolated to our test group.
Adding a button to a page that users never reach doesn't solve a discoverability problem. Good research isn't just about finding the problem. It's about making sure the solution actually addresses it.