[UI] General cleanup/redesign of the frontpage, A/B testing

[brainstorm]

The current design is a bit cluttered with tags, features and latest user(s) activity. Study other ways to present the information, following today's design practices.

One good example of such simplicity would be Google Scholar and perhaps Stackoverflow itself, we have to find a good balance between simplicity and usability.

[satra]

The intent is to do something along the lines of google scholar - keep the front page ui rather simple.

In the above diagram:

• each of the links will generate the full blown UI with posts
• the search box stays simple with live elements
• the two boxes at the bottom shows the 5 most recent posts or 5 related to your interest posts.

[satra]

here is google scholar for a comparison

[ialbert]

I would recommend using a tool like Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/

this allows pages to have different formats, then one can actually measure the effect of altering interface elements.

The current interface went through at least three redesigns, but there is no question that I made most decisions based on gut feeling. But it is important to note that I am also a very heavy user of Biostar and I have made many of these decisions based on daily use over years, I kept putting in what I found that I really wanted to know with least amount of clicking around.

For example knowing how many people are on the site and what places they are visiting from makes me feel like part of the community. Seeing what posts get voted on also tells me there is activity on the site and allows me to discover valuable posts that I may have missed in the past.

So I would be cautious to remove too many things at once - we have to remember this is a social site not just an information delivery system. Early on I made a conscious decision to primarily cater to those people that like creating the content (people like myself) and not those that consume the content.

This is not to say that the interface shouldn't be redesigned, just keep in mind someone needs to create the content and be happy to be part of the community.

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 11:50 AM, Satrajit Ghosh notifications@github.com wrote:

[image: screenshot 2014-06-27 13 47 32] https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/184063/3415662/70f01988-fe23-11e3-9c8f-eae985fc451a.png

here is google scholar for a comparison

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/INCF/biostar-central/issues/43#issuecomment-47379792.

Istvan Albert Associate Professor, Bioinformatics Pennsylvania State University http://www.personal.psu.edu/iua1/

[satra]

@ialbert - your point is well taken. i'm not saying that all pages will be like this - just the front page. however, i also think that the two communities have different proportions of computational folks and that makes a big difference in what we might find as being useful in one community vs another. on stackoverflow or wikipedia consumers far outweigh contributors. we just need to figure out how to convert consumers to contributors and i think ui and content are probably the two key things that would help. since we have an opportunity for ui designers to help, i thought it would be great to have their input.

[brainstorm]

This issue was moved to ialbert/biostar-central#300