Mockup: Revised Homepage design

[ggeisler]

We need to consider the different types of repositories implementors might want to create (as evidenced in the user personas and other user research documents) and figure out how repository homepages for those repositories might look. Likely we'll want to offer various content blocks that can be enabled on the homepage, such as Sufia's Featured Researcher, and provide configuration to customize and turn on/off those blocks.

[ggeisler]

Below are some mockups intended to help move us towards a plan for updating the public-facing homepage. I suggest we try to hold off discussing implementation details/challenges at first and focus initially on what elements we think are necessary to enable a range of implementing institutions to relatively easily customize an acceptable repository homepage (assuming that in most cases an ideal homepage will unavoidably require some custom development). I'm not sure how minimal the options for an acceptable homepage might be but I'm not suggesting that all of what I show in the mockups should be part of what we provide. They're all just options to consider.

Based on discussion in other tickets and sources of information, here are things that seem like candidates for a homepage:

• Featured researcher block
• Featured work block
• Featured collections list
• Featured works list
• Recently added works list
• Most frequently used keywords list
• Randomly selected works (would be a list in a tab of the Explore section of Example 3)
• Randomly selected collections (would be a list in a tab of the Explore section of Example 3)
• Text block (for updates, about text, etc.)

The mockups below present the candidate items above in different arrangements. Obviously other combinations not shown are possible, such as a text block instead of the Explore block in Example 2, etc.

For the researcher and work blocks, I assume there will be a corresponding page with additional (if necessary) content for the featured block, plus previously featured items of that block type (e.g., "Featured Researchers" page with a running history of each previously featured profile). This is where the "read more" link would point to.

For all of the list type blocks, I assume we'd also provide a link to "All ..." that goes to a search results page scoped appropriately for that list, such as the "see all collections" link in Example 1.

Example 1

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Example 2

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Example 3

[vantuyls]

i really like how these look. how flexible are we thinking these blocks would/could be? how easy to drop another 'widget' into one of those blocks (e.g. a visualization of content in the repository) or to change Featured Researcher to Featured Something Else?

Thanks for putting these together.

[ggeisler]

@vantuyls I think your questions get into implementation decisions. If we wanted to support all of the examples in my mockups, then I'm guessing we'd want to implement things in a flexible way that supported new 'widgets' to be added to the range of options (because the mockups already include a large handful of 'widgets'). In the long run I like this approach because it would enable the community to produce and contribute new blocks that others could benefit from (that said, we use a widget approach in Spotlight and haven't had a lot of community-contributed widgets thus far).

That approach, however, would very likely involve much more development effort than simply picking a few widget options and limiting the administrator to choose among them. So how flexible the implementation we want to go with would probably involve a development cost/user benefit tradeoff decision.

[hannahfrost]

Thanks to @vantuyls for the feedback here. @ggeisler and I are interested to hear from others about the proposed home page layout revisions. Any concerns or questions about moving forward in this direction?

[hannahfrost]

@ggeisler @vantuyls I'm hearing crickets here, so inclined to move to the Ready column. We (Stanford) might be able to pick this up soon.