launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pilkington <pilky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 22 Feb 2010, at 1:25 am, Martin Pool wrote:

> Wow, these are really attractive.  I hope the ideas from this get into
> Launchpad.

Thanks :) As I say, I'm hoping to expand on them and then if people wanted them, then I'd help implement. But that all depends on everyone's feedback and opinions ;)

> I'm looking at these on a 12in laptop and it's quite interesting to
> see the impact of them viewed scaled to fit on the screen vs actual
> size.  These things tend to make what's above the fold very clear and
> often just composed of descriptive text, which is quite interesting.
> 
> A consequence of this is that it's not so obvious what you can do on
> any particular page.

Yeah, I think on some pages the issue is the variability of the description text. I used bzr as my sample for my project mockups, but with MySQL for example there would be much more of the page visible without needing to scroll.

> In particular on the home page the only option is "get started" and
> (much less bold) "find projects."  "Get started" actually means "host
> your project on Launchpad" but I think many users actually want to
> "get started" with asking for help with Launchpad or reporting a bug
> in Ubuntu.  So perhaps we can either make the search box just do a
> global site search, or add some buttons for particular tasks.

I'm of two minds about this. Part of me agrees that it needs to be more general, but a bigger part of me questions whether users just wanting to file a bug or get help will go via the home page. Their most likely avenues of getting to the project will be either via a search engine, or via the project's homepage. I could be completely wrong on this, but I'd wager that almost everyone typing launchpad.net in their browser is wanting to find out about launchpad itself. If I was to submit a bug or have a support question for bzr for example, I would go to bzr's homepage and then follow the links to the launchpad project.

> I think there was a general design trend towards deemphasizing the
> Launchpad branding and emphasizing the project that lives there: there
> is no top "Launchpad" branding on the site at the moment.  I find this
> a bit weird myself because there is rather little control for the
> individual project at the moment.
> 
> I realize it's not your main point here but I wish the site search
> would go back up to the top.

I can definitely look into seeing how it would fit up at the top, it currently resides in the footer. I'll have a play around next weekend when I have time to do some more mockups.

Thanks

Martin