launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/9/3 Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 11:13:54AM +1000, Jonathan Lange wrote:
>> When you say "someone who wants an overview of the project activity",
>> who do you mean? It sounds specific, and I don't think I've ever had
>> that use-case before.
>
> I may be the only person who actually runs this use case, but I visit
> project pages to see what's happening on it: is it using the bug tracker
> actively (proxy being new bugs reported), and so on for each of the
> applications. I do it because I want to understand how much of Launchpad
> the project uses in practice, because I want to see if the project is
> alive, and finally, because I want to know what sort of software that
> represents.

I don't think this is uncommon, I think it's just a version of what I
think of as the 'spectator' or 'observer' persona: you want to know
what's going on in that project.  Or, you want to know what kind of
capabilities Launchpad has and how people use it.

This person will be blocked from doing that, or get a poor impression
of the project and/or Launchpad, if:

 * Important space is used up with unimportant or unhelpful
information (like on the current bugs page) - it discourages people
from looking further.  I think Kiko or any of us who've used the site
a lot may automatically skip over it but to someone who doesn't know
that, it sends a message "skimming this will be slow work"

 * There's obsolete or irrelevant information.  I suspect many
projects have tried blueprints and then stopped using them.  If they
still show up on the project page, this can give several bad messages:
"this project seems to have stopped doing new features" or "Launchpad
doesn't have current information about this project".

 * The page is too large or too cluttered to skim: it's ok for it to
be rich and dense, as long as there is visual structure to skim it,
but it can't be four pages of text

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>