Feedback on website navigation and content

[leandrocontreras]

Hello, everyone!
I’m Leandro Contreras, and I’ve recently joined Crossref as a UX Researcher. In my role, I’ll be listening to the community’s needs and expectations, and use these learnings to bring you closer to the development of our tools and services.

We are currently working on improving our website’s navigation and content structure to ensure you can find the information you need quickly and easily.

To ensure our website improvements reflect our vast community , we want to involve you in new activities to share your feedback - we have started doing this in our 2026 Metadata Sprint, and we’ll continue to post updates here, where you’ll be able to share feedback directly with us in this forum topic.

This is good timing as well! We just launched a feedback form on our website to find the best term for a section that contains information about all our Crossref offerings. You can suggest your own terms if our current options aren’t clear:

Some important details…

1. You’ll see this form throughout the site, but only once. If you dismiss it or return later, it won’t reappear - we’re doing this to keep the interface clean;
2. The form will be available until the 24th of June, but you can still share your feedback with us by posting on this topic.

I’ll be monitoring this thread to answer questions and provide updates on new activities. Thank you for helping us build a better experience for everyone!

[thetan]

Nothing from above? Must be at least 20 characters

[boutaleb]

I would choose “Using Crossref” because it is the clearest of the three options. That said, I would suggest that a title such as “Crossref Services” would be even more explicit and intuitive.

[jajolls022]

Using crossref because is the broad umbrella. Menu sections with “Using” typically cover all the core services, tools, workflows, and how to guides.

[boutaleb]

The survey question explicitly asks where users would look for information about the services and tools that Crossref offers. For a first-time user, “Using Crossref” could be interpreted as a section explaining how to use Crossref, rather than a place presenting the full range of services available. That is why a title such as “Crossref Services”, or perhaps “Crossref Services & Tools”, seems to me to be more explicit and intuitive. In UX, the aim is generally to minimise the effort required for interpretation: the more closely a menu label reflects the terminology users already have in mind, the more natural the navigation becomes.

[leandrocontreras]

Thank you all for taking the time to give this feedback - it’s really great to see the thinking behind the navigation option you would see as the best one in this case!

Even though we have concluded this particular navigation study, this feedback is important to us, so we will add it to our study’s database. Thank you so much for your participation! And if there’s any new website UXR initiatives, I’ll make sure to post them here as well.

[boutaleb]

Now you’ve made us curious… Which option ended up winning in the end? Or is that still a Crossref secret ?

[leandrocontreras]

The option that had most votes in the end was…drum roll…

…”Using Crossref”!

However, we’re still thinking about whether the differentiation between listing services, documentation, and community projects and programs makes sense in its current form - for example, we had some feedback from a considerable amount of users that for them, “Using Crossref” alludes to documentation of a service, instead of the definition of the service itself. So we’re going to rethink this further into a navigation that can clearly distinguish these concepts for ease of navigation!

[hliu092]

I’d like to choose “Metadata tool”.