launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/9/16 Martin Albisetti <argentina@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Hello fellow Launchpadians,
>
> The end of our 3.0 cycle is approaching, and one of the bug pieces
> missing from the puzzle is a home page refresh.
> I've taken a few hours to sketch out something we can work on, and
> split it into 2, one for logged in users, and one for the ones who
> aren't. I think we want to take the approach more and more, where
> logged in users see something different, as they usually have
> different needs.
> I'm on leave until next week, so I've also uploaded[1] the balsamiq[2]
> source files so anyone can tinker with them as the discussion goes on.
> Once I start work again full speed on Monday, I will be sprinting for
> 2 weeks, so it's unlikely I will be able to HTMLize this, so I'll need
> a volunteer to do so and land the branch  :)

I think splitting it into logged in vs not as a very promising
approach, and you've avoided a trap I probably would have fallen into,
which is to assume that 'logged in' == 'experienced user', when in
fact many people logged in will still need some guidance as to how to
get started, play or learn new features.

There is a question of whether the main user dashboard should be at
l.n/ or l.n/~mbp or l.n/~mbp/dashboard.  Or arguably the home page
should redirect to something explicitly named after my dashboard,
which is what I think rememberthemilk does.  It may be useful to let
other people have a url by which they can see a privacy-filtered
version of my dashboard.

Both of them look more clean and fresh than the current page.

I like the prominence of blog posts and their apparent replacement of
non-blog news items. (Oh, apparently that's already happened.)

On first reading this I thought "oh, Launchpad's getting per-user
blogs? how cool".  So maybe it should be labeled "Launchpad news".

If it's going to be per-user I really think it needs a bit more about
me: my bugs (subscribed/assigned), merge proposals, and projects.  I
think it should be most-recent-first for these, and it needs a lot of
care to cope with people involved with hundreds of bugs, projects or
teams.  As a start, almost a placeholder, it would be good to at least
give just links to those common destinations, even if you don't say
any more about them.

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