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cernopendata / opendata.cern.ch

Source code for the CERN Open Data portal
http://opendata.cern.ch/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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UX: several "home pages" #73

Closed tiborsimko closed 10 years ago

tiborsimko commented 10 years ago

Another UX observation.

OT1H, the current home page offers navigational split between for-education and for-research entry points. This is nicely understandable to casual visitor.

OTOH, The EXPERIMENTS menu that is rather profminently positioned in the page header -- and which is the only actionable "experiment" link on the current home page -- leads to page where the we present CMS or ALICE experiment information and links to data sets.

However, the initial for-education vs for-research dichotomy is lost there. To me, the EXPERIMENTS page looks like it seems to play yet another "home page" role, which may give confusing UX to casual visitors. ("OK, now is this for education or research?")

Could we think of a way to reconcile the two entry points and combine them into one?

Proposal: remove experiments page from menu and move some of its parts to the main home page, so that visitors could choose CMS or ALICE information directly from the get-go.

(see also #72)

katilp commented 10 years ago

I agree with this suggestion

pamfilos commented 10 years ago

One option can be something like this:

screen shot 2014-09-05 at 5 28 57 pm

where someone can choose purpose/experiment together, with distinction

tiborsimko commented 10 years ago

@pamfilos Yes, that would address the issue at hand nicely.

One thing we may want to look at further here is that current "pretty logos" (head, lab flask, atom...) are kind of graphically standing out; they seem brighter and bigger than even experiment's logos... Perhaps we could tune them down a bit; make them slightly more grayish.

cranmer commented 10 years ago

FYI, I noticed that the live version of the experiments page has a <b>CMS</b> with html tags visible

suenjedt commented 10 years ago

@pamfilos and others: even though I like the current setup with purpose/experiment selection together. I do think, however, that we need to check how we change/refine this once we have more experiments submitting data to the portal. This might get a little crowded there... so I am hesitant. Given the limited time that is left, we might not have a big choice. I wonder, if we could test other approaches, e.g. mouse-over or collapsible elements (just thinking out loud here), later. Another comment: I do like the (top) experiment entry point providing more background info for the current exps providing data in the portal.