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Needfinding

Core Insights

Through extensive competitive analyses and user interviews with various figures in academia, we learned about various use cases and perceptions of current repositories.

Based on our research we derived three central pillars to center the Ubiquity Repository design.

1. Communicates ready-to-use experience

A repository's interface should invite the user to engage with the platform and its contributors. It should consistently update its materials to communicate the impact of the work being done at the institution.

2. Search that feels in control

The repository must create a search process that communicates ease of control and seamlessly integrate with the information architecture of the repository.

3. Convey impact of authors + work

The repository must present statistics that demonstrate the impact of the authors' work and should serve as a platform for discovering researchers in mutual fields.

User flow design

Incorporating mental models

From our interviews, we learned that most people conceptualized the repository into two functionalities: “Search” and "Explore”.

While “Search” served users with specific queries, “Explore” served users who wanted to broaden their search from a single query. We used this distinction to broadly shape our user flow. This allowed us to retain a level of familiarity when designing the visual interface.

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Modular design components

Giving customization options to managers

One of the very first problems we heard about during user research was the lack of customization options for repositories. Repositories were seldom updated, and could not showcase any relevant research. Could we design the repository in a way where managers could easily customize their repositories?

Inspired by online newspapers and journals, we created modular design components that could be easily inputted with information and displayed immediately.

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Working within the constraints of our grid system, we designed a modular card system to accompany different size cards, and to accommodate different types of media. With this system in place, managers can easily update and customize their repository by choosing a specific card style and inputting the relevant information.

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Design Iterations

Validating our results

With a prototype of the core functionality, we reached out to some of the repository users and owners that we previously interviewed to get their feedback.

Branding presence was too pronounced

One concern we received was that our homepage looked like a University landing page. The banner we had designed was far too large and served solely to inject the institution’s branding. In addition, users were not accustomed to the lack of a search bar. We decided to input a search bar into the banner and shorten it to surface more repository content on the landing page.

Unexpected search results

Apart from the homepage, the “Search Results” page was the second most likely to become cognitively overloaded. We opted to add an “People” tab in the search results because people felt distracted by the side panel displaying results for relevant figures in their institution. We also adjusted the color-coding design on our filter tags to avoid confusion with author icons.