Re: [libreoffice-website] Proposed Drupal Frontpage and Genral pages theme -- Drupal Web. Dev. Team

Hi Marc,

thanks a lot to the whole team! And of course, thanks for the changelog
etc. I would love to provide detailed feedback, but I really miss the
time at the moment ... so here just a few "instant thoughts" from a UX
perspective (that usually means that we mainly refer to those items that
require tweaking, we mostly skip the positive stuff *g*).

Drupal Frontpage ...

Information Design
      * Visual Hierarchy
              * The most important element (Download) button is hard to
                locate. It misses the "conventional" design being green
                and at a prominent position.
              * The groups/elements miss space to get better separation.
                As people say "space is information".
              * The header graphics (colorful) moves away the attention
                to the more important stuff. It also seems to be
                animated ... so please either keep the site as clean as
                possible and keep the larger header graphic, or remove
                the visual intensity of the header graphic.
              * The text and element sizes are somehow unusual. Some of
                the text is very large, some of the text is tiny.
      * Editorial Content
              * Text like "I need help" may be true, but only few users
                want to hear that they are helpless :-)
              * The "I ..." have been a matter of debate for a long time
                on the OOo website. The "I ..." doesn't add value and
                doesn't help to feel "part of the community".
              * The Web 2.0 stuff (great idea...) seems a bit scary with
                the square brackets. And, it seems to use a lot of
                space ...
        
Layout
      * The layout requires intensive scrolling - some of the
        interesting items for those who are not aware of the activity
        within the community, might miss the news and the blogs.
        Although I do like its presentation.
      * Some items are visually connected to others, although there is
        no information link - e.g. the search box connected to the front
        graphics.

Visual Design
      * The visual design doesn't fit together ... for example, the logo
        at the top got some mirroring (why?), but the remaining items on
        the page show drop shadows - with light from directly above. the
        other items show shadows with light direction "front". Some more
        items are just flat. The text in the header graphics shows
        shadows with light from the right side ... it doesn't create a
        harmonic and consistent impression. Another example: Some of the
        object edges are rounded, some are "sharp".
      * In most cases, websites (and UIs) do look good, if they are
        aligned to a certain grid. Within the current proposal, most of
        the item groups are unrelated / not aligned with other items.
        This would create more "visual stability" and predictability
        (where to look for what).

Accessibility:
      * Elements sometimes do have limited contrast. For example, the
        text in the header graphic is hard to read (white on bright
        green). The "breadcrumb navigation" is black (small font) on
        gray background.

Okay, time is up :-) I hope this criticism is perceived to be helpful
instead of annoying. However, I'm looking forward to see some more
information with regard to the community goals, and thus, the visual
language.

By the way, maybe I have discussed some things not being meant for
discussion. I recommend to use the "Fidelity Matrix" to improve such
kinds of discussions. I blogged about it here:
http://uxopenofficeorg.blogspot.com/2010/05/picture-is-worth-thousand-words.html

Mmh, I just saw the mail by Ivan - so feel invited to discuss that with
some more people on the design list.


Michael and web-site team, sorry for mis-using this thread - I still owe
you some information on the UX workflows and tools. Yet to come :-( But,
has there been any consideration of implementing website analytics /
statistics to further improve the page once it is online?

Bye,
Christoph

Am Dienstag, den 23.11.2010, 06:57 -0500 schrieb Marc Paré:
> We have put these up on the wiki for you to see and discuss. We need 
> comments on both the Frontpage and general pages theme. Feel free to 
> question. We are hard at work getting the site ready for early 2011. 


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