Golden is a startup, building a self-constructing knowledge base using Artificial Intelligence. I suggested the topic page redesign and potential solutions.

I. Insight

Since Golden officially launched only a few months ago, and the product is still in its early stage, I came up with a hypothesis for the user and Golden at the moment based on the feedbacks from Product hunt.

User wants

to learn about the topic
to explore more around the topic
to contribute on the contents of the topic
to rank up by contributing

Golden wants

to acquire more users
to fill up the empty contents
to encourage the users to contribute
to promote product’s AI feature

II. Identifying problems (current layout)

Based on the hypothesis, I went through the topic page and found some areas that have potential for a better user experience.

1) The navigation bar at the top and the infobox at the right have similar functions; learning about the topic and encouraging the users to be engaged.

2) There are too many typography styles which could distract the user’s readability.

3) Lack of consistency; different but similar shades of gray, low text contrast, and various button sizes.

III. Goals

1) Strengthen the user flow. Eliminate the possible interferences through user experience.
2) Build consistent visual elements

IV. Analyzing elements’ properties

To re-construct the layout, I investigated each elements from the original layout and organized them by its properties and characters.

Contents

Header
-Topic title
-Bio(summary)
-Thumbnail
-Infobox(summary)

Body
-Contents

Footer
-References

Action
Read(Topic page)
Edit
Create Topic

Watch
Favorite
Share

Explore

-Categories
-Related Topics
-News

Engaging
Suggestions
Issues
Contributors
Recent Activities

Invite Contributors

V. Designs

As a starting point of refining visual identity, I cleaned up the color palette and the typography style.

Solution A, Subtle iteration for utility

This direction keeps the similar grid of current layout, but offers better experience by bringing explorable items on the right shelf.

I created this layout to keep the user’s eye flow; from category > topic title > summary > infobox > contents, which goes in deeper while the user reads the page down. I placed the categories above the topic title to guide the user to navigate at a broader level, and I moved the Infobox to the contents area to give the user a useful brief of the topic.

The right column became the feed. I moved the contributors to the top, which may possibly encourage users to contribute for a higher rank. Then the user can see the latest news related to the topic in the same page that helps them to explore more easily. At the bottom, the user can check the latest activities of the topic page.

Solution B, Stronger focus on AI

This layout promotes the AI features stronger, and the drastic design change may acquire new users as it stands out among the competitors such as Wikipedia.

The left side solely focuses on the topic, and the other half has all the relative information. For improving user contribution, I kept the contributors at the top just like direction 1. The news and the related topics are in the same priority which suggests the users to explore more. Also the AI features, the suggestion and the issue, are accessible options to figure out and encourage the user’s willingness to contribute to the topic.

Common updates for both solutions

As the user hovers the cursor over, a little yellow pencil icon shows up next to each section titles for the users to edit the contents on a single section easier.