launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Huw Wilkins <huw.wilkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Launchpad,

Jakob Nielsen's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend 
most of their time on other websites." The hypothesis being that users 
form their expectations about how a website will work based on their 
experience using other websites.

There are a number of general of things that I think don't help us make 
a good first impression in this regard. Here are three bigs things I 
think we should to start with:

Global header/navigation - in the past this was removed to make the 
project pages into more individual sites. In practice Launchpad is about 
cross project collaboration and a global header helps to tie these 
projects together. This will only become more important as we push to 
make Launchpad more about how the user interacts with projects.

Proper sub-navigation - our facets (bugs, blueprints etc.) are a rabbit 
warren of pages. With proper sub-navigation for each facet we can clean 
this up. Some individual pages will require a third level of navigation.

Subdomains - while I can understand the reasoning behind our apps having 
been moved to individual subdomains, our apps are now too integrated 
within the site to considered individual apps. Individual subdomains 
work well for separate apps (think docs.google.com, calendar.google.com) 
where those apps are distinct and have little integration. Our apps are 
now just different parts of the same site (I can't just log into 
translations.launchpad.net), in-fact we want to encourage integration 
between our apps, not make them isolated. Subdomains as parts of the 
same site are unnatural way of working, they make for some very 
confusing navigation at first as well as making URL hacking really 
difficult. We will also get speed improvements due to a single SSL cert, 
not having to load media for each domain etc. We can easily map our urls 
over to something like launchpad.net/launchpad/+bugs, 
launchpad.net/launchpad/+translations etc.

I will start to address these issues, with the help of some of you, and 
pushing to get developer cycles to fix them where I can't.

There are quite a few smaller places where we don't necessarily do 
things in the most normal way. I want to tackle these too, but these are 
the big sweeping changes I would like to make first.

Cheers,

Huw