🗺️Think about the viewer's path
Another element of profile-driven design is recommending content to keep the viewer engaged and browsing the site. Lets start with an example
Robert is visiting Caitlyn's website and is interested in a specific publication published in 2022. From the landing page Robert goes to the publication list and filters by year to show only the entries from 2022. Robert clicks on the publication, reads the abstract and decides to download the pdf version to read the whole paper later. What happens next?
You can see on the Figma mock-up there are two sections to explicitly address the question. The related links and explore other publications. These are very different but ultimately serve the same purpose.
| Related Links | Explore Other Publications |
|---|---|
These are links that the owner of the site has manually attached to the publication. In this example there's a group and two documents. | These are automatically generated links. How they are selected is up to you, the designer, to define the selection criteria. See the page on filter and rank options for more information. |
These are direct links since they are user-defined, meaning that they have the strongest relationship to the piece of content the viewer is seeing. | Indirect links are generated automatically, and should be designed in a way where a user won't be served the same indirect links on different pages. |
Direct links should be displayed directly after the body content so the viewer sees them as soon as they're done with the content. | These should be displayed last. As a viewer makes their way down the page, if the direct links are of interest, they'll click on them and have no need for the indirect links, but at the end, the alternative is they leave the site. This is almost the last resort to keep people on the website. You can also include the see all publications button to take the viewer back to the full list. |
However, there are also other things to keep in mind. A researcher might link to a publication from another source. Take another example:
Robert found one of Caitlyn's publications on a different library website, but there was a link to her website taking Robert to the same page as before. However, he did not even see the homepage or any of the other publications Caitlyn has.
While there are explicit solutions, there are also implicit solutions.
Evidently, the navigation bar contains links to everywhere else on the site, but we want to create many opportunities for further exploration. So for each author listed (just below the title), we can also link to their website.
Uniweb knows if any given profile has a website attached to it. This means that with only one link, Uniweb will direct the viewer to the website if they have one, and link to the profile if there is no website. This will also automatically update so whenever the researcher gets around to enabling their website the link will direct people to the website without any changes from the owner.
But, that's not even the end of it. For each badge (date, journal name, volume, issue, status) you see we can create the link that will show the viewer the list of publications that also meet that criteria. Or you could configure the link to take the viewer to Uniweb and show all the publications at the institution matching that criteria.
My point is, you can create these very useful links to keep people interested, and make it easy to explore the website.
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