When I first load the page, I am greeted by an empty space.
From here I didn’t know what to look for, since I didn’t remember what kind of things where in the database.
I tried clicking on table to see what content is there.
Ok, too much information, hard to navigate.
I remember that one of my manuscripts made it to the database, so I look up my surname
That was easy! (and it loaded very fast)
The interface is very neat too. I want to see more papers, so I click on one of the tags.
I get what I wanted.
Now I want to find a list of all the tags. Hmmm I cannot find this anywhere.
I give up and look at another paper:
Oh cool! The Alignmnet Newsletter summary is really great. Whenever I read something in Google Scholar it is really hard to find commentary on any particular piece.
I tried now to look for my current topic of research to find related work
Meh, not really anything interesting for my research.
Ok, now I want to see if Open AI’s “AI and compute” post is in the dataset:
Huhhh it is not here. The bitter lesson is definitely relevant, but I am not sure about the other articles.
Can I search for work specific to open ai?
Hmm that didnt quite work. The top result is from OpenAI, but the rest are not.
Maybe I should spell it different?
Oh cool that worked! So apparently the blogpost is not in the dataset.
Anyway, enough browsing for today.
Alright, feedback:
This is a very cool tool. The interface is neatly designed.
Discovering new content seems hard. Some things that could help include a) adding recommended content on load (perhaps things with most citations, or even ~10 random papers) and b) having a list of tags somewhere
The reviewer blurbs are very nice. However I do not expect to use this tool. Or rather I cannot think right now of what exactly I would use this tool for. It has made me consider reaching out to the database mantainers to suggest the inclusion of an article of mine. So maybe like that, to promote my work?
Thanks so much for this feedback, that’s really helpful. I really appreciate you walking through the screens and sharing your thoughts and intuitions on each.
I definitely agree with your points. I should note that this app was made in a few weeks for a narrow population; there are clearly a lot of nice features that would be neat, but take more time. Finding good trade-offs is really important but tricky.
Good recommendations and states before search are one obvious area to improve, but I think would require some significant thought to figure out and implement.
Around when to use this tool, I have my own uses, and am curious to see those of others. I think it has some value now, and hints at a lot more value that could exist with more powerful implementations. I’ve used it in the past to get a sense of “How promising does researcher|institution X seem?” for which doing a quick search for them, and paying a lot of attention to the blurbs, helps a lot.
(Note: If anyone else reading this wants to maintain/improve it, or just make a better version, please go ahead! I expect to be busy on some other things for a while.)
My user experience
When I first load the page, I am greeted by an empty space.
From here I didn’t know what to look for, since I didn’t remember what kind of things where in the database.
I tried clicking on table to see what content is there.
Ok, too much information, hard to navigate.
I remember that one of my manuscripts made it to the database, so I look up my surname
That was easy! (and it loaded very fast)
The interface is very neat too. I want to see more papers, so I click on one of the tags.
I get what I wanted.
Now I want to find a list of all the tags. Hmmm I cannot find this anywhere.
I give up and look at another paper:
Oh cool! The Alignmnet Newsletter summary is really great. Whenever I read something in Google Scholar it is really hard to find commentary on any particular piece.
I tried now to look for my current topic of research to find related work
Meh, not really anything interesting for my research.
Ok, now I want to see if Open AI’s “AI and compute” post is in the dataset:
Huhhh it is not here. The bitter lesson is definitely relevant, but I am not sure about the other articles.
Can I search for work specific to open ai?
Hmm that didnt quite work. The top result is from OpenAI, but the rest are not.
Maybe I should spell it different?
Oh cool that worked! So apparently the blogpost is not in the dataset.
Anyway, enough browsing for today.
Alright, feedback:
This is a very cool tool. The interface is neatly designed.
Discovering new content seems hard. Some things that could help include a) adding recommended content on load (perhaps things with most citations, or even ~10 random papers) and b) having a list of tags somewhere
The reviewer blurbs are very nice. However I do not expect to use this tool. Or rather I cannot think right now of what exactly I would use this tool for. It has made me consider reaching out to the database mantainers to suggest the inclusion of an article of mine. So maybe like that, to promote my work?
Nice, thanks a lot! Also, the random examples at the beginning would be fairly easy to add.
Thanks so much for this feedback, that’s really helpful. I really appreciate you walking through the screens and sharing your thoughts and intuitions on each.
I definitely agree with your points. I should note that this app was made in a few weeks for a narrow population; there are clearly a lot of nice features that would be neat, but take more time. Finding good trade-offs is really important but tricky.
Good recommendations and states before search are one obvious area to improve, but I think would require some significant thought to figure out and implement.
Around when to use this tool, I have my own uses, and am curious to see those of others. I think it has some value now, and hints at a lot more value that could exist with more powerful implementations. I’ve used it in the past to get a sense of “How promising does researcher|institution X seem?” for which doing a quick search for them, and paying a lot of attention to the blurbs, helps a lot.
(Note: If anyone else reading this wants to maintain/improve it, or just make a better version, please go ahead! I expect to be busy on some other things for a while.)