launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Jeroen.

On 30 November 2011 04:17, Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The tweak
> ---------

> Would anyone mind if I stuck some kind of “join us on IRC, we're here to
> help!” somewhere near the top of the help.launchpad.net page?

Not at all; great idea.

> We currently have this near the bottom, somewhere under Other Stuff:
>
>  * Contact us: #launchpad and #launchpad-dev on Freenode, <...>
>
> Why do I even ask?  Because it will mean spending more time on IRC
> explaining things that users could, in theory, be finding out for
> themselves.  In the long run though it may also mean more users helping each
> other out on the channel, more feedback, and more fun.

Relatively few people end up at the help wiki, so there'll remain a
chunk of people who don't see that. According to our PageHits page
[1], not that many help wiki visits are to the front page.

> The reminder
> ------------
>
> Notice how we tell people to find us on IRC without even mentioning IRC?
>  That's pretty cryptic.  They'll think #launchpad is a Twitter tag or
> something.  It's easy to forget that the stuff we do all day isn't obvious
> to everyone!

Interesting you should mention that #launchpad not looks like a hashtag.

> There's a bit about mailing lists as well, slightly clearer, but I for one
> would have missed that.  I find the eye starts skipping text when it finds
> things that don't make sense.
>
> And that, by the way, is why I did not start this message with "tl;dr:".

The new user experience needs fixing. We have a Product team road-map
for guerilla-style projects we plan to complete over the next few
months, without having a feature in place. The new user experience is
one of them.

When someone registers for Launchpad we should have a video, or
something that's equally as effortless for the new user, that says
what to do next and how to get help.

Thanks for raising this.

-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell