Proposed design objectives -
- To offer an opportunity to browse meaningfully, for those who are not searching for something specific, and approach from "top down" (probably home page)
- To provide greater context to those who land directly on an item page. (And then travel "up" to community page with breadcrumbs or other link)
- Convey the community's prestige, purpose, breadth, level of activity, or other quality
- To assure members of that community that this is a legitimate, trustworthy place to deposit materials
- To assure visitors from elsewhere that this is a legitimate, trustworthy place to find materials
- To provide opportunity for serendipitous discovery
- To provide a platform to share specific information on behalf of that community. (ie, via "news" widget)
Proposed page elements -
Using existing features
- Format Logo, title, description, handle link, and rights statement nicely with adequate whitespace
- keeping in mind that any of these elements may be absent, if the metadata does not exist
- Add sidebar on the right
- Search box, news box, browse all items by title, etc... box, most downloaded / recently uploaded widget
- Main Content area –
- Has list of sub-communities and top-level collections
New feature ideas, arising from our user interviews
- Breadcrumbs. Offer sense of place (grounding) and serve as navigation
- For each sub-community / collection – provide a lot of information, as much as possible
- Description. This is really important.
- Can we make at least a short description a required field?
- If not, can we emphasize in the submission form links how valuable it is?
- Badges indicating the number of items of each entity type therein
- These should be links – leading to faceted search results?
- In the case of an "empty" collection, a badge can provide that information
- Unfolding accordion which reveals the sub-communities / collections inside.
- News widget. It would be super useful if its label could be customized as well as its content.
- In addition to most downloaded / recently uploaded, what about "featured" items?
Mockups (works in progress)
V1.
V2.
v3. (Jose Carvalho)