Improve data and app product pages

[LibbyUX]

Early ideation zone

@danqaurooni, last weekend I played around with Obsidian per your recommendation. Are you still enjoying it? Are there any other comparable products on the market similar to Obsidian?

I found Obsidian's Publish product intriguing. It could be beneficial to have a public-facing Wikipedia like website for our HRA Knowledge Base or the HRA Help Center, for the lack of a better name at the moment!

This product could be a solution to easily link all public-facing information about our apps/data products. It looks like this would require little development labor, and it could be considered more of a content-based, UX copy type project.

Content that could go well in here would be:

• FAQs
• Overview of each data/app products
  • How can users benefit from using these products?
• App guides for how to use products

I could envision all "Overview pages" for Apps and Data on the HRA Portal (for example, ASCT+B Tables and ASCT+B Reporter) having respective and interlinked Wikipedia type pages. It would be nice to have that occur fairly automatically during the content construction process, too.

I don't want to box us into a certain technical framework, however! I am curious to hear other people's thoughts on this matter.

[bherr2]

Sounds related to the Developer Portal. Obsidian generates markdown, which we plan on using for documentation as well.

[LibbyUX]

@bherr2 Yes, I think we can take a similar route for "App Guide" content. Obsidian isn't necessary.

The difference between the content for the Dev Portal and the "App Guide" content is that this content serves a broader range of users, such anyone trying to use our apps and needing a How-To guide to complete tasks, such as clinicians, researchers, developers, funders, and more. I've started creating and compiling this content here: https://github.com/hubmapconsortium/hra-ui/wiki/Application-Guides

Basically, I'm proposing leading an overhaul of the written content we currently have on the HRA Portal and how it looks visually. I definitely envision this appearing and behaving identically to the Dev Portal template. If we go this route, I can also make sure each page has better access to similar or related content.

This is low priority and early iteration. I have had it on my wish list for a while, but just wanted to get it in writing here as a feature request.

[LibbyUX]

@bherr2, I've sat with this thread/feature request for a couple of weeks and I wanted to reach out:

I was never satisfied with the design of the content pages for the redesigned HRA portal. Now that we have a better documentation page template because of the Developer Portal, would you approve of this template also being used for the documentation pages on the HRA Portal? For example, the Developer Portal template being used for HRA Portal's FTU Illustration page.

I want to propose this to Katy and iterate perhaps before development work begins on the new HRA Portal. We could have a better template in place for development than what was originally approved in November.

The content will still need to be updated, but I will track this separately and work with others on this content.

Having one standard documentation page template (HRA Portal, the Developer Portal, and the ASCT+B Reporter) could improve the user experience in house for our employees and the user experience for people exploring our vast product line. I see value in adding this template to the design system for pages of this nature.

Please let me know your thoughts and if I should proceed on proposing this to Katy.

Figma

• Sandbox: Potential Documentation Page Template
• Flex spec canvas: Developer Portal