Hi all,
Well, I tried to force a march to finish website designs by the end of
this week but in the last week not only have we seen some good designs
but also some excellent critiques of process. But I do really think
that we need to act on this and set a hard deadline with mockups as
well as requirements to illustrate what we are thinking.
The issues, to summarize (see the wiki [0] for a lot more):
* Basic Goals:
A. To enable efficient downloading, especially for naive Windows users.
This usually translates to one-click downloading. And one click
downloading means that users do not learn of cdroms, p2p, etc. The
resolution is to do what we do now, modulated: after the click, user
is sent to the contribution page, which can have other elements, such
as, "Consider buying a CDROM or downloading via P2P if you experience
difficulty downloading".
B. To inform users of OpenOffice.org, the product and community/
project and how they can participate.
We can resolve this with buttons and short descriptions, eg., "The
best free productivity suite" is fairly efficient. I think having the
mini icons as we have now is useful but not crucial; it can be placed
elsewhere. As to the project and participation: a tab is useful--and
I'd suggest, expected--and continues with the established look,
something that I acknowledge is important to continue with, though by
no means to be held slave to.
I envision a page that has links for support, participation, language
communities; extensions are important. "Support" can be in the end
"portal" or we may end up having a big link to 'portal' once we have
more content there--and that's going to happen. :-)
But we need to keep the information on the home page as simple and
thus simply effective as possible, esp. given the focus of our goals.
Secondary pages can add more information. Thus, portal can provide
all that "new to OOo?" promises, as well as other useful information
and links.
* Process
I had hoped that we could have been able to finish the requirements
phase by now and come up with mockups based on the key ones. We are
not really in agreement and I see no point insisting on one mockup
over another if the community who will own it disagrees. :-)
David also raised the idea that I'd considered at one point of paying
for a usability testing. I'm open to that; we can pay for it and that
may help. I do confess to being skeptical, however. What do others
think?
Assuming we do not use usability testing--or even if we do--I'd like
to still impose a deadline, and make it a hard one: 15 December.
Note, I first introduced this idea in September ;-), though I
recognize the time consuming nature of work like this....
Given, too, the increasing length of the requirements page, and the
double goals --is it the homepage or the putative portal? is this all
about just users? I'd suggest we split the pages and thus clarify our
focus. We would have:
* homepage requirements: what goes on the homepage
* and the established user page requirements: what goes on the portal
(assuming that is what it is) and ancillary pages (note: more than one).
The homepage requirements would be an set of those things in user
requirements but would allow us to focus. (I'll go through the list
and see about creating the homepage wiki requirements but if someone
else wants to help out, I'd be more than grateful.)
I also think it makes sense for someone to own this. I can (more or
less futilely) drive this but I think it makes more sense for a
designer to own it. And we have some quite talented people here ;-),
including Maarten, Christian, Filip, William, Kay, Matthias, Kay, et al.
Finally, as to payment: Sun wants a better homepage for OOo and that
is, among other things, my goad. They are willing to pay for the
design. My interest is in ensuring it is a community thing, owned and
maintained by the community. But that does not mean that Sun can't pay
for the labour required for the design and implementation.
Best
louis
[0] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Pages_Requirements
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