Lanfrica V2 Changelog
Lanfrica V2 is officially here! After months of hard, mostly-silent work, we are very happy with the revamp of the Lanfrica platform. We are proud to share the new functionalities now possible, improving your discovery experience. Below is a changelog-style detail of the different components of the Lanfrica platform in V2.
Homepage redesign
We significantly redesigned the homepage, with bright, lively colors.
The landing page features a section that answers the question "What can I look for?" This helps new users immediately understand the breadth of available AI resources in Africa.
In addition to our blog, we highlight the latest news in the "News" section of the homepage, helping you stay on top of things.
A streamlined About page. We discuss the context and problem we are tackling, as well as our vision.
A Team page that enables you to discover the faces behind Lanfrica. You'd be surprised by the amazing people in our community - from the governance team, the advisory team, to the operations team - Africans working hard and taking charge of their narrative, by building the foundation of mapping the African AI ecosystem. We also share our growing list of partners.
A funding page that provides transparency into the non-profit's funding journey.
A lot more stuff in our footer, with quick links to easily access them. Check out our brand new data governance policy.
User Experience Improvements
We made special efforts to ensure our platform works smoothly on mobile devices. Check it out.
Light and dark mode. We installed a unique Lanfrica dark mode that makes you feel at home, relaxes your eyes, and gives you a sense of calm as you explore all of Lanfrica. Try it!
Support for different languages. This was very important for us because we believe that for Lanfrica to be impactful for many people, we need to be cognizant of people's comfort with different languages. So, we built the new platform with a multilingual support framework, enabling us to provide support for other languages. Right now, it supports French (thanks to Chaldrak Dokpa, our frontend engineer from Benin). We plan to add support for more languages. We're excited about adding our first African language!
Lanfrica Platform revamp
The search and filters are at the top and are more streamlined.
New grid layout for the records. The design of the grids takes inspiration from African roots, representing the connectedness of things. We also support a list view for those who prefer that.
Pill buttons at the top of the records grid display important metadata, such as the record type, domain, etc. Not all records have this yet. As we continue to organize the vast records we have, we hope to provide this to them in a reliable way.
Fixed a major issue with pagination when scrolling through records.
Significantly improved the search algorithm. Search is much faster and more intelligent now. You can search with natural language (like "wolof speech dataset") and do not need to use the filters. Read more about how search works. (Note: For now, the filter and search do not work together.)
You can share search results easily with the share button.
Single Record Page
Let's look at the features using this record as an example.
The abstract supports different formatting, allowing for a much richer presentation of the record's description, including links, lists, and other formatting.
We improved the feel and look, including the look on mobile devices. Our guiding principle was to make it easy for the user to quickly see the important information they need to make a decision about the record. So, metadata like the task, language, tags, and license are now right beside the abstract (and under the abstract in mobile view), while the domain, record type, and contributor information are right under the title. This makes for a much nicer feel and a more intuitive way to view the record's metadata, perform actions (like sharing), and see the rest of the record's metadata below.
User sign up
Users can sign in to the platform for a more personalized experience and more control over their profile and future contributions. Click the "Sign in" button at the top right. Creating an account is super easy—you just need an email address. When you sign in, you have a sidebar with the following:
Dashboard: Your home through which you explore and use Lanfrica. In the future, we plan to add more components to the dashboard.
Profile: Allows you to view and edit your profile.
Settings: Allows you to customize Lanfrica to your preferences.
The Notifications setttings is currently disabled as we are still working on it; will be released in V3. See more in what's coming in V3.
Dedicated support platform. If you are doing anything on Lanfrica, or new, and you need assistance, have questions, we have a dedicated support channel (or rather channels, to accommodate different tastes). Learn more here.
And others...
What's coming in V3
While there are many features and functionalities in V2, the job is far from done. There were a lot more capabilities we wanted to provide, but had to prioritize. V2 is the "era of search," and our priority was to create a new, relaxed, and effective search experience. V3 will be the "era of contributions," and we have the following in the works:
Enabling users who sign up to Lanfrica to link records. This will be huge and revolutionary: learn more about linking on Lanfrica here. In the meantime, you can still contribute to Lanfrica through our support platform.
Enabling infinite scrolling; currently, scrolling only supports pagination.
Enabling the notifications settings.
Fixing major bugs we weren't able to fix in V2 beta.
If you have any feature requests for us, please reach out. We'd love to hear them.
Ability to mark records as favorites and have them display in the "Favorites" section of the sidebar.
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