Thematic Area Welcome Page

[aboydnw]

Description

We have received feedback a few times from NASA and EIS that the thematic area welcome page would be more useful if it contained the information & configurability currently housed in the thematic area about pages. We are in discussions with NASA about the long term direction of the dashboard, how thematic areas might become less prominent, and there may have to be alternative solutions to this. (see this slack thread) However, at the moment, EIS is sending people directly to https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/dashboard/eis

As a short-term remedy, we would like to include some space for additional information on the thematic area welcome page. Whether this means deprecating the thematic area about pages and shifting that content to the welcome page, providing more space for configurable content like text, images, videos, or an alternative solution is up in the air. We have some latitude to propose the best way forward, so long as users landing on the url above don't have to click Learn More to view information about EIS.

This should free us up to move towards a longer term solution for thematic areas, navigation, welcome pages, etc.

Acceptance Criteria

• Given I am a user of the VEDA Dashboard, when I visit the EIS thematic area welcome page then I see some content (that might include text, images, and videos) that has been defined by the EIS group describing the EIS project

[aboydnw]

@danielfdsilva @hanbyul-here @nerik @ricardoduplos @faustoperez take a look at this ticket and let me know what you think. This came up during a conversation today with the EIS team as a short-term compromise so we can continue moving towards our long-term vision. We can discuss during backlog refinement. cc @michaelgsuttles

[danielfdsilva]

Moving the configurability of the about page to the homepage is pretty easy. The only thing we have to decide is what to do with the content we currently have there (feat discoveries/datasets and other thematic areas).

A couple of options are:

• Remove them entirely
• Add the configurable content, before, after or at any point between what's there
• Provide "non configurable components" (like <FeaturedDatasets />) so that users can decide themselves where to place them.

@ricardoduplos @faustoperez thoughts?

[michaelgsuttles]

@aboydnw I think this once again brings up a larger question of "who is VEDA for?" I haven't seen an indication in our project documentation that one of our product goals is to serve as a landing page for certain offices at NASA--and as a follow on thought, if we do want to serve such a purpose, what is the goal therein? Do they just want a hub where they can see their coworkers' publications? Do they want to easily be able to access the analysis page to analyze data? Getting to the root of these questions will help guide us as we potentially revamp the site, and if it makes sense to try to accommodate NASA offices' desire for a homepage when we are starting to newly focus on academic users, for instance.

Developing a clear, succinct product goal would also help provide us with a north star to clarify whether requests like this fit into our overall goals for the product (and/or if those goals need to change). Our product vision, "Provide a unified open source science cyber-infrastructure for data processing, visualization, exploration, and GIS capabilities (re-)using an ecosystem of tools and services with key NASA datasets," doesn't seem to include this, for instance.

I know my thoughts here are more long-term, and this task is more focused on a short-term solution, but just food for thought as we move forward.