launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 22 February 2010 23:23, Martin Pilkington <pilky@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> 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.

istm that we should have some usage data to address this: how popular
is launchpad.net/ as a landing page compared to a project-specific
page; what do people click on this page; what do they type in the box;
what links do they follow from that page; what search terms do they
use to arrive at that page.

Also, making that box be a general search box can probably only be an
improvement.  If you type "gnome do" you'll probably still go to the
same page.

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