ResearchHub product update — 12/20/21
ELN development, profile page improvements, and design exploration
During ResearchHub’s latest engineering sprint we split our team's efforts between continuing to build out our ELN, developing the Editor program, and exploring how to improve our web applications UI/UX.
Electronic lab notebook
We continued to make progress on adding Jupyter Notebooks to our ELN. ResearchHub users can now add a Jupyter notebook to our ELN and clickthrough to edit that notebook via JupyterHub’s user interface. Eventually, we plan to further integrate JupyterHub to remove this additional step.
We also worked on automatically syncing the Jupyter Notebook code to our ELN whenever new code is written. Here is a Loom recording of the automatic syncing in action. By the end of this week, we plan to have a limited release of the Jupyter notebook integration to our ELN beta users.
If you would like to help beta-test this feature — come swing by the ResearchHub community Slack and say hi!
User profile page
In order to make ResearchHub’s user profiles more useful we updated our author overview page to be more similar to Reddit’s account overview.
Think of it as an Author timeline. Instead of having small sections and linking to tabs, we are putting a feed of activity in author profiles. This includes any user-generated content like comments, paper uploads, posts, and hypothesis additions. We also think this profile page update will help Editors show off all of their efforts creating content within and growing their respective Hubs!
Our current designs look like this:
Design exploration
As our community continues to grow, it is critical that we continually iterate on our application’s UI/UX with the goal of reducing ResearchHub’s barrier to adoption within the scientific community. With that in mind, we took some time this past sprint to reimagine the design of ResearchHub’s most popular pages. In addition to the Hub-specific homepage shared at the top of this blog, here are some of the early examples of our most recent design exploration.
ResearchHub’s homepage:
The paper page:
These designs are thought experiments on how we can potentially improve ResearchHub. If you have any feedback on these different layouts that you would like to share, here’s another shameless plug encouraging you to stop by our community Slack in order to join our weekly community call!
Bug fixes
In addition to the work mentioned above, we also tackled a number of user-reported bugs over the last two weeks!
- All tabs on the homepage are now fetched from the server
- Fixed bug of sometimes seeing the wrong cards on the homepage
- Fixed broken link when clicking on an author’s avatar on the homepage
- Removed unnecessary backend fetches to speed up the homepage’s loading time
- Fixed a bug with categories not showing up in AddHubModal
- Fixed issue with Hypothesis notification emails
- Fixed slow load of the paper leaderboard
If you are interested in contributing to ResearchHub’s mission of accelerating the pace of scientific research — join us by signing up at https://www.researchhub.com/
