Robert Vojta wrote:
Yes, this is done by art project, but ... As a new user, come to www.openoffice.org and try to find how to help with promotion. So, you will click on the "new user & general info" (1st click). Then you have to read quite a lot of sentences until you'll find 'participate' link (2nd click). Now, you'll see Marketing, OK, you have to guess it's a proper link (3rd click). Then you'll hit the Marketing link (4th click) and you'll see two links - Join or Distribute. The user doesn't want to join or distribute, he wants to know where are the banners. OK, he clicks Join (5th click) and then, victory. 6th click leads to page with banners.
Design principle:
The best journey is the one with the fewest steps. Shorten the distance between the user and their goal.
Distance is not only measured by the number of clicks, but also by how hard you have to think before each click. For thexample, the 2nd and 5th clicks are very bad (long distance).
I think that the OOo website is very poorly designed. I'm not saying it's not pretty. I'm saying that information you need is very very difficult to find. I just spent several minutes going around in circles trying to find "system requirements". Shouldn't that be easy to find? Isn't that likely to be a popular destination for users? I just could not find it. I ended up having to do a Google search for it.
#include <please-make-the-site-usable.h>
Do you understand my thinking (I know, too difficult sometimes ;-)? I do not want to duplicate any existing work / site. I want to take the most important info from "all" projects, the most important guides, FAQs and put them on the small, not growing, site where the new user will find everything very quickly.
That seems like a great idea.
How doesn't OOo do this now?
It does, but the site is too huge and not very friendly for the newcomers. This site is very good for more experienced users and volunteers, not for newcomers.
Even an experienced user like myself struggles a lot with it. OOo's website simply does not make usability a priority.
We can also have fun creating a general page in MP that provides all the above (minus the add ons but with links to them). What this entails is putting the links in one place, really.
No Louis. Making a site usable (and hence, useful) is not just putting all the links in one place. You really have to think hard about which links to include, which to exclude, the page layout, and wording so most page visitors find what they're looking for quickly.
Try to think like newcomer:
That is a very good step.
- what the "hell" is the OpenOffice.org? - why I should use it? where are the benefits?
"will it run on my system?"
He is not willing to go through this process if there is a lot paragraphs with text, which is not interesting for him.
This seems to be a common problem on OOo sites. Lot of pages consist of just huge paragraphs of text. People just skim over large blocks of text. They scan, not read.
Not sure what you mean, exactly; you meant on OOo homepage? then you are right. But we have the "new users" page and we have rather flexible other pages.
I mean the OOo homepage. As I wrote few paragraphs before, it's too
complicated on the first look - too many paragraphs, too many links,
+1
Cheers, Daniel.
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