#891: Investigate development of personalized homepage
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Reporter: jcaffaro | Owner:
Type: task | Status: new
Priority: major | Milestone:
Component: WebSearch | Version:
Keywords: WebColl WebBasket WebAlert |
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The main goal of this task is to investigate how to ease access to
preferred/personal/relevant user content. A proposal is sketched under the
form of a personalized homepage with direct links to such content. Note
that this ticket can be seen as a high-level, stub ticket, as it proposes
several independent paths to explore, possibly triggering discussion and
the creation of subtickets/tasks that can be achieved progressively.
Contents of interest to the users of Invenio can potentially fall into the
following (non-exhaustive) categories:
* records marked as favorites by the user (currently handled with
personal baskets)
* records marked as interesting by colleagues (shared baskets, tags)
* record matching some user-defined criteria (based on metadata: search,
alerts) and pre-defined criteria (collections)
(we reduce the notion of ''content'' to ''records'', leaving aside other
type of contents such as comments, which remain attached to a record).
Handling such personal content is already well covered by Invenio, but
simply not made easily accessible or convenient enough for a daily use.
Some trivial improvements can be done, but also more radical changes
involving renaming of concepts or replacement of current features can be
considered. Some of these are described below.
One of they key aspects of this proposal is to bring content of interest
to the front: many user-workflows involve accessing content in leaf
collections, buried in the collection tree. A basic improvement would be
to bring these collections to the main page, more or less as if they were
attached as virtual subcollections to the root collection tree, possibly
in their own area/box (one could see them as ''bookmarks'' to
collections). Users would be able to add or remove collections to this
area as wanted.
This "personalized" homepage could be extended at a later stage to support
direct access to other types of views:
* personal baskets
* shared baskets
* searches
* tags (if implemented and sensibly different from saved searches)
A basic implementation would simply link these ''bookmarks'' to the
already existing tools (eg. link to WebBasket, link to collection page,
etc.). A more ambitious scenario would consider a new unified interface to
deal with this content: a basket would look like any other collection, in
which you can search, set an RSS feed, etc. Some differences would still
exist as you can for example reorder or annotate records in a basket, but
not in standard collection. The same would apply to the creation process
that would be slightly different for each case: creating a basket only
require a name, while a saved search requires to set a query. Still,
giving the feeling that the same knowledge can be used to deal with these
different tools (and ensuring that it is mostly true) by using similar
layout/look/controls/patterns would help user adoption. See some early
mockups attached to this ticket, ''2007_YourCollections.jpg'' and
''2007_YourCollectionsHomagePage.jpg'' (Disclaimer: these mockups no
longer fully reflect the description made here, but can at least help
visualize the idea behind).
It should ideally be possible to switch on/off the personalized homepage
globally, as well as per user choice.
It should be decided if linked collection can be renamed or must retain
the original name of the collection.
The personalized box could appear with entire content on the main page, or
just as a summary linking to a more complete separate interface.
Bringing awareness of the latest changes in a set of records would help
making the tool even more useful. For example with a label indicating the
number of new records added to a collection/basket/search since last time
it was viewed by the user (or simpler: added in the last 24h or week):
Books ^(12,263) '''+20'''^
A good default set of collections to add to the personal homepage for new
users could be the restricted collections to which the user has access.
An automatic addition of most visited leaf collections by the user could
be considered.
A configuration file or plug-in based infrastructure could be implemented
to add specific collections to the personal homepage (for new or already
existing users) based for eg. on group membership such that 1) new users
immediately have access to relevant collections and 2) existing users are
made aware of new important collections. The user should ideally be
offered the option to add or remove any default collections, and be given
the assurance that they will not come back.
Alternatives (possibly incompatible with the above) and misc comments:
* Support for nested personal collections
* Fully customizable collection tree
* Submission workflows could also be part of the personal homepage,
though it might be confusing and not necessary (the submissions having
already gone under a refresh to display only relevant workflows to the
user)
(Note: the mockups originally lived at
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CDS/InvenioUsabilityYourCDS)
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Ticket URL: <http://invenio-software.org/ticket/891>
Invenio <http://invenio-software.org>
