Hi, >> The three tenets of Marketing >> *Create a need >> *Create a desire >> *Fill a present need
Important. But let me add: If the desire is not big, but the cost is low, consumption may still take place (e.g. take the free newspapers that get thrown at you) And if there are already needs (e.g. I don't have money, but would like to have a good office suite, or I want an OpenSource Office suite, or I would like to use something different than MS word, or I used OOo at school, and it worked great), we don't need to create a desire. Some bad outcomes: >> *They can't satisfy that curiosity within a reasonable time and they >> leave frustrated >> *They can't find the solution or it is not obvious and they leave >> frustrated >> *Fear of the unknown >> >> Our problem is right now, and the discussions up to this point are >> reinforcing this point, we are not asking the User what he wants to do >> we are telling them what we expect them to do, We inform them where to >> download, but we don't give them information that will make them feel >> comfortable about hitting the download button, or to stretch our metaphor >> a bit further, we talk to our horse about the trough but not about how >> good the water is, while the horse is still worried about drowning.. Well, we have the information, even linked from the main page, but it is not clear enough (e.g. click on 'office suite' in the introduction text, you get the product pages, telling what it is). Not that these pages don't need attention... >> which I'm a fan of. The difference is that we provide "Answers to the >> Question" >> >> "You have arrived at OpenOffice.org what would you like to do now?" >> >> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/a/a3/Home_page_draft_11-27.jpg I think you over-simplified the type of questions. Problem with a question based approach is that it may not fit all questions (or the user may have formulated their questions differently). Furthermore, long texts on buttons are not easy to process either, so I am not sure whether that would fit in with the simplicity approach. Simplicity to me means intuitiveness. E.g., One click download (no questions needed) is intuitive if it works like expected. What I would like to know though is, I am just not convinced yet, is what do you think the pages look like when you click on the specific questions, what will happen? This is what we have done wrong in the past, look e.g. at the 'New User page', good idea, creating a page for those who are afraid of the water, but the execution was poor, too much text, not friendly... merely a placeholder for something better yet to come (but has been there now for over a year, if not years...) I think we can offer a lot with a much more traditional approach (which is also good for usability, people have expectations of how websites work in general). Download is straightforward, a label stating support as well... almost all website use this so we can be rather safe in assuming that users know these concepts. However, the pages we send them to when clicking on these buttons/links are/may be not equal to what users expect. I think this is a much larger issue than a bad choice of items on the front page. If you do think however that a question based approach works, please show me how the subpages look like, or show some other website which inspired you to build the page like you suggested. For now I am sceptical about the question/answer approach. g., Maarten --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
