The face of Scinapse

About Paper show page in Scinapse

Pluto team is always thinking about how to deliver better value to researchers(user) than traditional academic search services. Paper Show page, which will be updated soon, is one of the attempts to approach these ideas through UI/UX.

Today, I want to share the background and process of improving Paper show page.

Face of Scinapse: Paper show page

Exemplary Paper show page on Scinapse

Scinapse can be divided into Search result page, Paper show page, Author page, andJournal page. Among them, Paper show page is containing all the information about academic papers.

As noted in Q4 planning post that was shared in October, Paper show page is the one that makes the most user inflow into Scinapse, but has a high bounce rate. This means most users are judging Scinapse’s first impression by Paper show page, and this page is not giving a good impression to users.

When we looked at the problem, we thought that the main reason is the following. Most users flow to Paper show page as a result of their search. So it is very important to give them the experience that “Here is not only the information you want but also a lot of information that will help you research”, rather than simply experience “Here is the information”. Because these experiences can lead users to other actions and change them into loyal ones. But the current Paper show page is not enough to give such experience to users. Because if users who did not adapt to Scinapse visit current Paper show page, it would be difficult for them to intuitively recognize where they are, where they can go, and what they can do.

To sum up, Paper show page is the face of Scinapse, and we need a new design to show this intuitively and attractively to users.

Plan

Based on this background, we had a meeting to discuss how to improve Paper show page. Many ideas came out, and we have planned to make incremental changes, since we can’t do that there is a limit to solve everything at once. Our plan is as follows:

1. Divide territories of Paper show page
   First, we want to organize Paper show page into a better structure. The goal is to enable users better understand what kind of information is there, which interactions can be made, and where they can further visit with every component in Paper show page. The advantages are:: 1. It helps first-time users understand the site easily 2. The actions are more visible 3. It helps to intuitively organize the relationship between Paper-Collection-Memo.
2. Induce more page views
   After dividing territories of Paper show page, It is necessary to let users know that there is more useful information on Scinapse. At this stage, Enhancement of function such as the recommendation of related papers will be necessary.
3. Encourage in-Scinapse searching
   If the action that move to another pager in Scinapse is significantly induced, next step needs a flow that encourages users to search within Scinapse, getting beyond a mere search result on Google.
4. Promote the Collection feature
   The Collection is a personalized feature. Following the prior steps, we need to promote deeper engagements in Scinapse with customized features like Collection.

Considerations

There are three main issues that we focus on.

1. Layout of Information
   Currently abstracts are shown in the left part of Paper show page. This layout may be the most familiar to users, but may not be the best to make them stay longer. Putting relevant information and buttons to the left can increase users’ awareness of those features since most of the time the line of sight moves left to right. Another approach, which is recently a trend in web services, is to place the text in the center, like Facebook.
2. Showing the search result
   We’ve considered showing the search feeds in Paper show page. Doing so may instruct the first-time visitors that Scinapse also supports searching. In addition, it may reduce the disturbance that happens when users go back and forth between search results and individual Paper show page. But we’ve decided that it could be an experience that’s too heavy, and may even disturb user experience.
3. Relationship of Paper — Collection — Memo
   Dividing territories of Paper show page was suggested while we were discussing how to improve Collection and Memo features. After making Memo feature on Scinapse, we received feedback from external users. Based on the feedback, we shared various sketches ideas to complement the problem, and a common solution was design related to segmentation. Although Collections and Memo are unique features of Scinapse, it is very difficult to introduce them to first-time users.

Ideas

The following are some wireframes(example screens) example made with the considerations:

The first example / The second example

The first example designed that allows the user to focus on the page by centering the content of the paper.

The second example is a designed that connects Search filter - Search result -Paper show. If the search keyword and the result are shown together on Paper show page, users can recognize that Scinapse has another information and the search action is possible.

The third example / The fourth example

The third example, which is the initial idea, is the segmentation design of Search-Paper show-Collection. This design can be intuitive to the user, but it can make users confused.

The fourth example is based on only information in the paper.
The left side shows reference and cited-by papers and, the right side shows the contents of the paper. This design allows users to see all the paper information at a glance without scrolling down.

New face of Paper show page

As a result of based on a wireframe containing the number of cases, we decided to organize the design of Paper show page. Paper show page consists of the following:

• Internal element of paper
  - Title
  - Abstract
  - References
  - Field of study
• External element of paer
  - Journal & IF of the journal
  - Published year
  - DOI
  - Author & Author’s h-index and affiliation
  - Cited by
• Actions provide by Scinapse
  - Cite this paper
  - Download pdf (move to source)
  - Add to collection & save the memo
• Actions to move to another page
  - Recommendation of related papers.
  - Recommendation based on the first author

Updated Paper show page is Coming Soon!

Based on these, we divided layouts into two main areas. On the left placed the elements of the paper that are at the heart of Paper show page, and on the right placed the actions that are related to the paper that we provide. In particular, the right side layout will be a space of infinite possibilities for us to emphasize new features. The actions are gathered in the simple action bar and have identical colors. This will make things clear so that even the first-time users will be able to learn easily.

As mentioned before, the main purpose of this update is to provide all information and actions intuitively to users, so we focused on design to make it easy to grasp information at a glance.

We are working on to make the environment where researchers can focus more on research. In addition to projects such as the Academic Database Normalization that we shared in the previous post, we are doing a lot of work to help researchers get access to and discover their research outcomes more easily, quickly, and efficiently. We will continue to define the problem, and continue to make new initiatives.

The update of Paper show page introduced today is scheduled to be released within the next week.

As always at the end of the post, if you are interested in our projects, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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