Do you use widgets?

[Elizabeth Quigley]

Hi Dataverse Community!

We are about to get started on making some updates to the widgets we provide in Dataverse for users to add their dataverse(s) and dataset(s) to their personal websites and are working on requirements for the improvements.

It would be great to get feedback from the community about the following things:

1) If you are running one of the 3.x versions of Dataverse, do your users use the customization functionality that allows them to embed their dataverse and all the content within it, into their personal site? If so, how heavily is it used and what feedback have you gotten from users about it? If not, why? 

2) If you are using Dataverse 4 are your users (or yourself) using the widgets? If so, how have the widgets worked for you so far? Are there any features missing from it that you would have expected? If so, what? Are there other widgets you would like to see released in future versions of Dataverse? If so, what types of widgets?

Thanks so much and please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have more feedback you'd like to provide outside of the Dataverse Community group.

Cheers,

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Quigley

User Experience Lead

The Institute for Quantitative Social Science

Harvard University

www.iq.harvard.edu/

equi...@iq.harvard.edu

[Sophia Lafferty-Hess]

Hi Elizabeth, 

We are still using 3.x (although we are hoping to migrate soon!) and many of our clients use the customization functionality. For many of our users this is a selling point for the Dataverse. They like the ability to create customized branding for their Dataverse and give it the "look and feel" of their organization or research project. That being said, we have experienced issues with the elements within the HTML code (particularly javascript) causing display or navigation issues for Dataverses. 

We are excited to start experimenting with the widgets as an alternative to the HTML branding for Dataverses. However, I have seen some discussion about expanding the customization functionalities for Dataverses in 4.x (i.e., expanding beyond the color and image branding to include CSS?). We would also be interested in these functionalities to give users more control over the look and feel of Dataverses (if it is possible to do so without running into the HTML display issues seen in 3.x).

Thanks, 

Sophia

Sophia Lafferty-Hess

Research Data Manager

Odum Institute Data Archive

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill