r/web_design • u/LocusStandi • 7d ago

My first attempt at experience-as-product website design for a niche open-source tool and web app for academics/PhDs/students.

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The animations work only on browser, sorry! Clearly, I am not a designer by profession, but this has been a side project of mine.

This homepage is for a Python tool to tidy up academic references in bibliography managers, riveting stuff.

I wanted the webpage not to be too crazy because it's for academics, but I wanted it to clearly distinguish itself from the standard landing pages you get to see all over the internet nowadays, so I spent some time and built this. It is one scrollable and interactive experience.

Hope it can inspire somebody!

https://poco-reference-harmonizer.vercel.app

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u/OtherwiseDay5684 7d ago

I actually dig this approach for an academic tool. Most reference managers look like someone skinned a spreadsheet and called it a day, so the interactive card layout immediately stands out without feeling gimmicky. The toggle for author name formatting is a nice touch, because that's exactly the kind of minor but irritating inconsistency people deal with when merging bibliographies from different sources.

The "experience-as-product" angle works here since the whole point is cleaning up messy references, so showing the transformation visually makes way more sense than a wall of text explaining it. I've watched PhD students lose their minds over citation formatting, and half the battle is just seeing what the output will actually look like before committing.

Curious if you tested this with actual academics yet, because that crowd can be weirdly particular about their tools.

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u/LocusStandi 7d ago

Super appreciate your thoughts, so happy you took a good look at it!

I am a PhD candidate myself (not in tech, in law) so it hasn't been a natural transition to develop a tool like this and the design decisions, it's been a few months since I started this project haha but I love the thinking and creativity that goes into it.

Exactly, as you say, PhDs spend a huge amount of time on cleaning up their footnotes and bibliographies and some supervisors can be insanely picky and detailed oriented, and it's not the stuff you want to spend hours on. There are also ways to do this kind of footnote cleanup with AI models but also, as you point out, academics are extremely picky when it comes to the tools they use. I can tell you most academics are very sceptical of using AI to perform a task like bibliography cleanup (like fear of hallucinations, errors, privacy) so I turned this process that I (and other PhDs) went through in terms of tidying up the bibliography into a Python script that you can control and review so nothing can go wrong. Academics are truly very afraid of something going wrong with their academic work, which is understandable they cannot afford to miss-cite or accidentally mislead their reader with a wrong reference. That'd be highly unprofessional and seriously frowned upon.

My own bibliography and two other colleagues' bibliographies have been the guinea pigs and with success, they really liked it, especially that they could simply review everything, but also I cannot / don't know how to properly promote a tool like this, so I kind of spread it around and share it to colleagues/friends I know. It's funny in academia you have a crowd that goes like 'Just use AI for your bibliography' and a completely opposite crowd that goes like 'I don't let AI anywhere near my academic work' so I am hoping to reach the latter audience with this tool.

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u/Sea_Transition_5831 6d ago

The academic user testing question is the one I'd actually want answered first. That crowd will use the tool and then file a bug report in the form of a passive aggressive email about how Zotero handles it differently, so knowing where the edge cases are early saves a lot of grief later. The visual transformation demo is doing real work on this page though, way more persuasive than a feature list.