We recently launched lens.elifesciences.org in order to get early feedback on our ideas. In this post the person who came up with the idea - Ivan Grubisic - explains a little bit of the back story.
By Ivan Grubisic
My motivation for developing Lens came from my general frustration of not being able to see the figures and references while, at the same time, reading scientific articles. As you know, PDF files require the reader to manually scroll from page to page, while most HTML pages create anchor points that jump to that figure or reference, losing the original spot in the text. Creating a split view experience was the first step to managing this problem. I pitched this idea to eLife and then with support from Ian Mulvany, who helped build a great team including Michael Aufreiter, Graham Nott and Ian Hamilton, we began to quickly iterate to get to a functional minimum viable product.
By splitting apart the figures and references from the main text, it allows the reader to see all of the pertinent content at once. Scientists will often times approach research articles in different manners depending on their purpose for reading it. If they want to understand all of the details, they will focus on the text. This led us to implement an automatic scrolling behavior that would scroll the relevant figures automatically into view based off the paragraph that is being read. Alternatively, some readers want to initially focus on the figures to get the purpose of the article. The figure in view would then also trigger the same automatic scrolling behavior, bringing the first paragraph that references that figure into view.
Automatically triggering changes in the viewing experience, however, is not a trivial problem. We therefore reverted to manual triggering of the focused views. We attempted to do this at first by switching the view directly between the text and figures, all the while displaying only the paragraphs that are pertinent to the selected figure. After user testing, we noticed that people were confused about where they were located in the space of the article.
This then lead us to develop the document map. The map is integrated into the scroll bar and outlines each paragraph in the article. The simplicity of the map allows the reader to either scroll through the text or to click on a specific paragraph. The document map now highlights the selected figures and references so that it is easy to jump to all of the occurrences of them in the text (but never losing your place).
eLife Lens is the first step to simplifying and unifying the reading experience. The goal is to improve the ability to focus on the author’s arguments by minimizing any distractions with minimalistic fonts, a simple color scheme and intuitive navigation flow. We are continuing to work on making the interface as clean as possible and continue to experiment with a variety of new features to improve the native function of Lens: to provide a novel way of viewing, and subsequently, interacting with scientific content.
