In an era of dynamic web content, open data, and increasingly powerful browsers, the PDF still rules supreme as the primary form through which new research is read. This is a shame, because it means fewer researchers are taking advantage of opportunities to more fully convey the full, reproducible narrative of their research through tools like interactive figures, executable code, and live data visualisations.

Our user research indicated a number of rather predictable reasons for PDF’s continued dominance as a research consumption format, including portability, offline reading use cases, and good old fashioned familiarity. But one of the most prevalent reasons given by our users for preferentially using PDF really surprised us: “because it looks nicer”.

Aesthetics are easy to underestimate in the realm of reason and scientific rigour, but even the most analytical mind is still human after all and, whether consciously or not, appreciates reading experiences that minimise visual noise, reduce distractions, and therefore limit sources of cognitive load beyond what’s needed to interpret the content being read. In the case of research articles, “looking nice” is in fact a proxy for some important aspects key to an article’s readability:

A clean layout, with a clear visual hierarchy

No intrusive sidebars, calls to action, thumbnails or adverts

A legible, high-contrast font

Good-sized figures that can be consumed alongside the article text

These aspects formed the basis of eLife 2.0’s article page design, and went on to influence every major design decision throughout the rest of the site.

The new Article page (left) drastically simplifies scanning for relevant information against the previous design.

Inspired in part by research into reading behaviours, as well as text-focused platforms from Medium to the Amazon Kindle, the new article page in eLife 2.0 provides a clean, distraction-free layout with a flexible navigation structure that supports how reading and skimming behaviours vary across desktop and mobile. In addition, eLife 2.0 article pages more seamlessly embed our signature Lens view (for simultaneous text and figure browsing), which is now accessible by selecting the Side by Side option alongside the traditional Article and Figures views.

The new article pages are also optimised for reading across a wide range of devices and screen sizes, and should load significantly faster than our previous site thanks to a streamlined page asset budget and our new IIIF-enabled figures. Standing for International Image Interoperability Framework, IIIF allows us to more efficiently serve the large images behind our figures by efficiently delivering only the bare minimum image data needed to render an image at any given screen size.

IIIF also forms the basis of further enhancements to the site. Shortly after launch, we will be deploying an enhanced asset viewer that will take full advantage of IIIF’s feature set. This new viewer, which we’ll also release as a standalone open source tool, will allow figures viewed in full screen, and all their supplements, to be zoomed with very fine granularity thanks to OpenSeaDragon. This will let users interact with very large, highly detailed images with no performance penalty on almost any device. In the future, IIIF will also allow us to explore the ability to let users annotate our figures, as well as a number of other interesting use cases.

And what about offline reading? We’ve now laid the groundwork for the implementation of Serviceworker, a technology that will soon let eLife 2.0 articles cache locally on your machine, so that once you’ve browsed to an article you can go offline, reload it from your browser history or a bookmark at a later date, and it will still be there waiting for you. Or, you could download the article into ScienceFair and take advantage of its powerful manuscript management functions while enjoying your papers though our eLife Lens view.