BinderHub’s current landing page is a form with a lot of fields, dropdown menus and options. You can do “everything” with it but it isn’t very friendly for newcomers and hard to discover what the different options do/when you should use them. We’d like to improve this by introducing an “awesome bar”.
In contrast to the current form there is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with-binder/ which let’s you click a single button when you are on any kind of page that could be launched on mybinder.org. It will try its best to figure out how to construct the URL to visit (basically what to put in which part of the form). This is what I personally use day-to-day, I find the form too tedious to use. Replicating that kind of user experience (or even improving on it!) is the goal of the awesome bar.
This post is to link to an issue in our github repository that is about designing and then implementing what we are calling “the awesome bar”. Ideally the BinderHub landing page would only have a single text box into which people paste the URL of the repository/notebook/thing they want to run on Binder and it figures everything else out.
The Binder team doesn’t have a huge amount of experience with frontend development so this is also a call for help to those who have experience with UX/UI design and those who have skills on the web development front. We have previously collaborated with designers (for example to create the awesome repo2docker logo) and it was always a great experience and the outcome is way better than what we could have done ourselves.
For more technical thoughts, constraints and links to previous related discussion take a look at: https://github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub/issues/844