Platform Redesign: New Front Page, Context Filters and Dynamic Preview Images
As part of our efforts to welcome new users better, we decided to complement the simple design of our front page (until now little more than just a search bar) with a few short, concise pieces of information about the “why, how, and what” of our project. The old design worked well for people who already knew our platform, but we want to improve the way we communicate the functionalities as well as the broader political context in which we see Open Parliament TV. Through a prominent link to our Open Data API and our GitHub page, we also want to give our overarching themes open source, open data, and interoperability more weight: https://de.openparliament.tv.
Search: Filtering by Context
Also on the front page, this redesign tackled a topic that had long puzzled us: when we filter by entities such as people, what exactly are we filtering by? By the person’s speeches? By the speeches in which the person is mentioned? By those in which they act as president? By those in which they were automatically detected through Named Entity Recognition? How can one be distinguished from the other without making the search filters too complex and cluttered?
Our solution is a new feature that lets you (optionally) define exactly this context when searching. In other words, I can now specifically search for speeches given by Person X while Person Y speaks in the context of an interjection. Or only speeches in which Person Z appears in their role as vice president rather than as the main speaker. Have fun trying it out!
Dynamic Preview Images
Almost as important as searching is sharing speeches. That’s why, right from the start of the project, we made sure that quotes from the speeches could be shared on social media and other platforms with nicely designed preview tiles. Now we’ve finally implemented this for other pages as well: search results, full speeches, and profiles of people, organisations, documents, and terms. When shared, these now automatically get a dynamically generated preview image that matches their content:
Alongside these changes to the surface, a great deal has happened in the places that aren’t so openly visible. We have significantly improved, restructured, and documented both the architecture of the platform and the architecture of the entire project: github.com/OpenParliamentTV/OpenParliamentTV-Architecture.
Our next post will be dedicated entirely to the topic of architecture, standards, and interoperability.