Hi Mimi,
Adding to the in-line answers tangle...
Mimi Yin wrote:
Thanks for bringing this up on the list Philippe. See more in-line...
On Dec 11, 2007, at 1:12 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Hi,
Trying to fill out some description form for Chandler on some French
website (http://wiki.framasoft.info/PropositionNotice/Chandler), I
stumbled on some rough edges using chandlerproject.org. Here's a list
and proposals:
- Donation page: It's amazing how deep and hidden our donation page
is. The only way to find it is through the FAQ. Proposal: have a link
up on the landing page.
Should this be somewhere prominent at the top of the 'Get Involved' page?
Frankly, I see no reason not to have it on the landing page. Most people
won't try to "Get Involved" but would be just happy to "Donate". We
might miss on donation without this. FWIW, the amount of donation we get
for the moment is close to nill so it's clearly not well advertised
right now.
- FAQ/Features/Known Issues/Release Notes: There is a tangle of names
and little consistency: some pages link to others, some don't, so
it's hard to navigate. Proposal: have all of those pages listed in
the left hand panel from the landing page, have all of them link to
each other in a consistent way from the left hand panel (the banner
of clickable words is weird)
Yea, this gave me a lot of headaches when we were redesigning the
landing page/wiki nav for Preview. I think
I hesitate to throw all of these things in the sidebar because I think
we need to do a bit more layering / prioritization for people coming
to the landing page for the first time.
'Release Notes' is really a sub-page of 'Features'. 'Troubleshooting
Chandler' is a sub-page of FAQ and Known Issues.
I think the availability of these commonly used pages is precisely very
important for the first time visitors, the lurkers poking around to see
what the project looks like before diving in and downloading. That being
said, I agree that crowding the left hand link list might not be great.
An expandable list of links here would be nice.
I think what makes the nav most confusing is that the 'Get Started
Guide' is just a separate entity unto itself. I wonder if we could
simplify things a lot by taking it down for now, try to answer the
basic questions in the FAQ and focus our energies on a 'Tour of
Chandler' page. (See below.)
The FAQ is very general, already long and goes all over the map. Burying
useful data into it won't help first time visitors understanding
Chandler. I agree that a nice, interactive "Tour of Chandler" would
help. I don't think we need to take the Get Started Guide down for this
though.
- Screenshots: They are currently tucked at the top of the features
page. I think they should have their own page and, like the others,
be linked from the landing page on the left panel.
I think we can partially ameliorate this by labeling the blob of
images on the right-hand side of the landing page. I will mock
something up.
Yes, I actually didn't realize (or forgot) those were clickable until
Heikki mentioned it...
- Tips/Hints page: Despite all of these pages, we don't have a page
to add simple and useful hints/tips for Chandler. Proposal: create
such a page and, again, link it from the left panel.
How about a new 'Tour of Chandler' page which includes:
+ Better demos
+ Screenshots
+ List of Top Ten Tips
+ Link to Feature List
The problem I see with a single link on the left side getting to a page
that includes more links is that it makes the navigation difficult. If
for instance the screenshots page doesn't show the links to the Tips
page, the user needs to navigate with the Back button to get back to the
page with the relevant link. It's much better IMO to keep the list of
useful links available all the time and in the same visual spot so that
the user can explore them and not get disoriented through a hierarchy of
pages.
Again, I think a click/expand link list in the left panel would be best.
This could easily be implemented with some CSS trickery, no complex
JavaScript required.
Cheers,
- Philippe
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