Feature of the Week: BibSonomy's new Look

The days at the end of the year are usually a good time to look back on the past 12 months and to take a look ahead to ideas, tasks and challenges for the approaching new year. This week's post is dedicated to the latter and the bigger goal we have set for BibSonomy in 2012 is to give it a new, revised and modern design.

Since its birth in 2005 BibSonomy has been enriched with new features to facilitate and ease the organization of bookmarks and publications, the social interaction with other scientists or getting up to date with the state of the art in science. For some time now, we've felt, that BibSonomy could use a fresh look and a new, reorganized navigational structure, to keep all this functionality together while still being a lightweight and easy-to-use system.

With all that in mind, earlier this year, we started two initiatives: The first one was to set up a project together with our University's department for Human-Machine Systems Engineering. In that project students from different disciplines were asked to use BibSonomy (as first timers) for several tasks that belong the the system's core (like storing and retrieving publications, searching for them or for other users). The participant's behavior was analyzed (e.g., using professional eye-tracking tools) and their feedback collected.

The second initiative was to find a capable designer who could give BibSonomy a fresh, cool look and feel while making functional and intuitive navigational design a key priority. Finally, since changing established workflows and interfaces is usually a delicate matter, another priority was to keep a new design true to the current look and feel.
We are happy to announce that for that task we could win a young designer from Kassel: Daniil Tanygin.

Before we begin to realize a new design, we now want to ask you - our users - for your opinion. Therefore, here are two of the latest sketches Daniil has created for us that show one of the many post-listing sites (e.g., myBibSonomy or home) in BibSonomy:





Any feedback is welcome. We are especially looking forward to your thoughts on the new design ideas and to your own ideas on workflows that you think should be simplified, parts of the page that in your opinion should look different or functions that need to be made more intuitive.
Feel free to state any comment below this post, or send us your feedback via e-mail to webmaster bibsonomy org

Happy tagging
Stephan