launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Martin.

On Sun, 2010-02-21 at 21:33 +0000, Martin Pilkington wrote:
> 1. Removing unnecessary clutter - removing things that are better
> suited on other pages, and re-arranging items to make a cleaner look
> 2. Expanding links - for some items that were previously linked to,
> I've pulled the content onto the main page
> 3. Improving terminology - Some of the terminology in Launchpad can be
> quite confusing 

Thank you very much for working to improve Launchpad's UI issues. We are
not planning a redesign this year, nor have we committed to do so next
year. The 3.0 UI took 30 engineers 3 months deliver. Even though we
fixed issues that went back to the beta UI, We do not believe we can
undertake a redesign as you propose without committing the whole team
two months.

I was very excited to see you proposed designs for the person and tam
pages, which is think are bad and need fixing. Can you propose fixes to
these pages using the current design as a guide[1]? When I provide lots
of information to these pages, the information is badly presented.

The challenge when designing for Launchpad is to understand the many
communities that use it. Your designs favour the connection between the
person/project and the end-user, but that is not a goal of Launchpad
[2]. The most important communities are Ubuntu contributors, project
developers, opportunistic developers, translators, and bug triagers.
Your designs drop information that the most important communities need.
The primary problem with the person and team pages is that they must act
as both information to other users and as a tool for the person/member.
There are many bugs reported by users regarding the team and person
pages: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-registry

For example, your design favours showing who is in the team, but this
information is rarely needed by the communities that use the team. Team
members and proposed members want to see the changes in membership that
is on the current page. Your design drops the "Subteam of" portlet; I
think this is worthy of discussion because I am uncertain this portlet
works when there are many teams listed. The PPA and Mailing list
portlets do not appear to be providing information that users need, and
actions that users want to take. Ubuntu users need better information
about packages and projects that a person/team is involved with.

[1] The current design's attempt to place small domains of information
in to boxes (portlets) is flawed. Not all entities use the information
in the portlets, and they are given equal weight on the page, which
skews the importance of the information

[2] Answers is the only application that must be usable to end-users

-- 
__Curtis C. Hovey_________
http://launchpad.net/

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