Updated landing page mockup for research paper library

First of all congratulations for submitting a wire frame. It is so much better to have a critique of the functionality at this early flexible stage.

I will go through the page from the top:

First of all I think you have thought about your fold line somewhat. But maybe not where it ends. Make sure you have got a comfortable fold line.

I am slightly confused about the sign in/login which does not appear on your page ... whilst having to sign in this does put off new users I imagine it might put off your current users if they can't find where to login quickly. So I guess i need to understand how this is going to work. The point is check this design is going to work for both new and current users.

I like this design a great deal more than what you currently have. You are making much better use of your screen real estate.

One thing I do like about your current design is the very large search box. Wonder if you should keep this large in the current design.

The Browse Essays and writing guides work fine. I wonder if login should go up here too.

I like the fact that the yellow buttons can be removed if you no longer need that functionality. Do you really need four of them ... the quick research better grades does not really indicate where this will take you.

I think somehow you have to make the free option more visible. A lot of your customers will be cash strapped students. Maybe this would be a good fourth option ... the focus could be on "swapping"... Swap your essay for some free research time. Swapping is a notion most students are familiar with (-:

You have to make sure that the yellow options feel clickable. Not sure that they will if they don't look button like.

The green panels are very important. I think you absolutely have to get across that this is a genuine, valid and useful resource rather than some scam. So good idea especially for a landing page. The related essays box is also very key. Some endorsements from academics would be even better.... but maybe you won't find an academic prepared to endorse it.

In terms of allocation of space I would perhaps allocated more space to the related essays and slightly less to the "what members are saying"

On the right hand side the breadcrumbs are excellent (especially the numbers).

I'm not sure the button placed on top of the text rather than inline is a better idea. It will just frustrate your users that they can't read the text. I think it works fine inline as you have on the website currently.

I guess if you really want to minimise the use of text you could use some sort of hover facility so they get the start of a para and they have to hover to see more if they click then it gives the whole paragraph in the appropriate part of the essay. In this way they could get more of a summary of the whole essay. Each para could have associated keywords and perhaps icons to indicate how often they are used in the paragraph. Kind of a visual overview of the focus of each paragraph. Not sure how that would work.

You mention being able to give your users a sense of the whole set. You could think about visualisation tools to visualise the whole set of documents. Which are the most popular? What is hot right now? What has just come in? How do keywords relate to each other. This would be fun to explore and provide a buzz to encourage people to come to visit your site.

There are a whole host of word based visualisations that have been developed within academia that have yet to make it into tools regularly: Infosky http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=InfoSky Tilebars http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/research/tilebars.html http://www.improving-visualisation.org/vis/id=89 Treemaps e.g. newsmap http://newsmap.jp/ or even wordle type representations.

You could also make a lot more use of icons on your page ... create a page, view, keyword and comment icon. Gravatars next to the comments might give you some visuals.

Thats all I can think of right now.

As an aside reviewing a wire frame definitely forces one to focus on the user ... thanks again. I hope others do the same.

Hi Jens

you might be able to place a "View More/Less" button (rather than the floating "View full essay now") at the bottom of the visible copy, then use something like JQuery to display more or less of the copy.

In terms of flow for eye path, I recently saw this article on "Understanding Z-Layout" which might be of interest http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/design-theory/understanding-the-z-layout-in-web-design/

It would be good to mention this "100,000 essays" prominently somewhere, but it's hard to say looking at the wire-frame, as it already looks like a lot of information.

Maybe in the search box, the default text could read "search 10,000 essays". I don't really love that idea, but when you do the graphic layout, you might find the right place for it.

Before starting this review, I looked at the current site to get a better understanding behind only 2 buttons, in the navigation.

I have to say that I think this wire frame is better laid out than the current site, as it's not as jumbled.

One of things, I found awkward on the current site, is how the content area sits under the side statistics / related essays.

I also think that this wire frame seems a little more intuitive with the sub menu "stuck on your essay" under the main nav, I see that you can minimize it, I think it should only minimisable, once you have logged in.

In this mock up the "view full essay...." is this a button, or does it have a Grey overlay, over the whole essay area, with the button over the top? I quite like how you have it currently on the current site...

Hi Jens,

I spend some time today moving things around on you mockup. This is not a perfect solution as I would have to spend few hours first analysing your site. I didn't add any elements - just used what you put there.

If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

Michael

(user experience designer & strategist)