CLOSER’s Metadata Manager, Dr Hayley Mills takes us through the transformation of 
our Discovery research tool from when it first launched to its latest redesign.
CLOSER Discovery is the UK’s most comprehensive research tool for longitudinal population studies, providing a single point of entry to rich questionnaire and dataset metadata for 11 CLOSER partner studies. It is the only tool that you can use to search across UK longitudinal population studies, to identify similar questions asked of participants, variables on a particular topic, and how variables were measured in the original questionnaires. You can also find both social and biomedical study information in unprecedented detail.
“The Discovery research tool makes it so much easier to work out what questions and variables are available in a study.” PhD student
Since its launch in 2017 additional features and content have been continuously added, but until now, only minor visual updates have been made within the bounds of the underlying software. With this latest redesign, we wanted to improve the user experience and to make it more accessible for researchers and worked with Bravand, a digital design and build company that specialises in complex websites, alongside our current software provider Colectica, to achieve this.
The challenges
Creating a more user-friendly interface was a challenge. The abundance of information contained in CLOSER Discovery makes the site valuable for researchers, but it can be overwhelming. Users discover data in very different ways and as such there are also multiple routes to navigate the site, including by searching, exploring, and browsing, which makes it flexible for different needs, but can be challenging for those approaching it for the first time.
Bravand conducted research to see how users interacted with the website to understand their needs and build a complete picture of how they interacted with Discovery. This provided valuable insights for their proposed design to improve the experience of researchers.
We worked with our software provider Colectica, which provides off-the-shelf software for survey data documentation that aligns with DDI-Lifecycle, to implement this design. As part of a collaborative effort, Colectica worked extensively to update the software to implement this new design. Given the complexity of the software, this was no easy task, but the Colectica team shared our aims to improve the interface and worked closely with us to achieve this. As a result, the wider data infrastructure community will benefit from this update, as the new features and flexibility are now available in the latest version of the Colectica software.
Discovery presents complex information in a range of context dependent layouts, which proved to be a challenge when it came to improving accessibility. However, the team are committed to making our services more accessible and UCL’s dedicated Digital Accessibility team helped us make significant improvements in this area. Together, we conducted an accessibility audit against the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility requirements and have made significant progress on this. This is part of an ongoing exercise to improve CLOSER’s suite of resources to make them as accessible as possible.
A fresh new look
The new design of CLOSER Discovery was launched in November 2023 and has been receiving positive feedback.
“The new CLOSER Discovery portal search and browse interface is really great. Kudos to you and the others who worked on the redesign” – Jared Lyle, Executive Director, DDI Alliance.
CLOSER Discovery home page 2017, 2022 and the latest design launched at the end of November 2023.
The new home page is clearer and cleaner. It puts our partner studies front and centre, so it is easier for researchers to see which are included. A list of topic areas also features on the home page, enabling researchers to quickly see which areas are relevant to their research. The search and explore pages make it easier to filter, so users can locate the data they are interested in more precisely, and the results are clearer. The redesign also makes it easier and more intuitive to work with lists of variables or questions to keep for yourself, share with colleagues, or for a data access request. For those who are new to Discovery, we also feature a prominent callout box to greet new visitors and signpost them directly to our updated suite of user guides and videos.
Help us make further improvements
A research tool like CLOSER Discovery is a living thing – always growing, improving, adding more content, and new features. We plan to continue to make further improvements so try it out and get in touch through this feedback form.
Additional resources
How-to videos
We have recently added two new How-to videos to our suite of CLOSER Discovery user guides. These short videos illustrate how to search by keyword and topic. You can find these on the Discovery How-to guides resource pages.