launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 8:46 PM, Jonathan Lange wrote:

> However, I think that putting _everything_ that might potentially be
> of interest in the one page will have the net effect of making
> features less visible.

I completely agree.  Take for example, the index page of a project  
that uses a lot of LP services, such as Bazaar: https://edge.launchpad.net/bzr

This page is way way too busy.  There's more information on the page  
than I can see in one screen or that I can process quickly.  With all  
the information on the page, I actually can't find what I'm interested  
in very easily.  There's information I don't care about (right now)  
that's given more prominence than it should have, and it's just  
visually overwhelming.

It reminds me of the problem my son has with his math homework.  If  
he's given a page full of writing with 20 problems to solve, he gets  
overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work involved.  If however, you  
block out everything but the one problem he's working on at the  
moment, it becomes so much more manageable, in fact, easy!

What I care about on this page depends on who I am, or maybe what hat  
I'm wearing.  I don't think the page is fatally flawed, but I do think  
it could benefit from hiding most of the information, with selective  
in-page reveals for the stuff I'm interested in.

For example, right now I don't care about the Project information, or  
the Series and milestones, or frankly the Downloads, which takes up an  
entire screen's worth of vertical space on the right side.  I don't  
care about the FAQs or the Latest questions. What I care about right  
now are the latest bugs and how to get involved, but I have to scroll  
down a page to see any of this.

The Bazaar project page is probably an outlier (the Mailman page  
doesn't look as bad maybe because we don't use Answers and don't have  
many Downloads).  The person index page is similarly packed with too  
much information, but it's more manageable because of the single  
column layout and the fact that I don't hit a person's page nearly as  
often as I hit a project page.  (Although the fact that I NoScript  
block google.com leading to a big empty white desert in the middle of  
my page is disconcerting, until I click off Display map.)

Most of the 3.0 pages are fantastic improvements, so a rethinking of  
what's important on these index pages and how to best present the  
information would be worth it.

-Barry

Attachment: PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part