DESIGN OPPORTUNITY

The TU Delft student theses repository has not been updated since it switched to digital PDF reports in 2007. Currently, entries only contain a title, author and contributors, programme, date, abstract, and the PDF to download.

While the search engine is fine if you know the author's name or the title of the thesis you're looking for, users expressed that it's difficult to use the repository to find inspiration for your own graduation project, see what reports are good or not, or to find out what supervisors look for in a project, or what projects they usually take on.

After uploading, the entry looks boring, and doesn't grip the reader's attention. Furthermore, the entries are not very visible internally, or externally (like on google scholar) .

THE GOAL

My goal was to redesign the repository to:

● Allow students to upload (interactive) multimedia to their repository pages.
● programmatically add multimedia to already uploaded repository pages.
● Redesign the user interface with a user centered design approach.

THE SOLUTION

The solution

My new design features:

● 'Thumbnail' images, graphical abstracts, posters, embedded videos, and interactive embeds (such as 3D model viewers), which show what the thesis is about.
● One or two sentence 'pitches' under titles that allow users to quickly assess interest.
● Views, bookmark, and download metrics that show how popular a thesis is; Entry awards; featured theses; and supervisor highlights make it easier for users to find examples of good projects.
● Supervisor profiles that show all their supervised theses, some information on what they do, and if they might be available for supervising your project.
● Publishing theses will no longer be mandatory, so people who aren't proud of their mediocre thesis will show up less.
● Related theses/supervisors/keywords in a sidebar can help a user find more of what they're interested in.

[This is the abstract]@en