On 2008-04-02 12:49:27 PM, Richard Harrison wrote:
Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
"Simpler is better." Yes on a child's tape player; no in a cockpit.
Simpler's better in a cockpit too - just enormously harder to achieve.
At least having different content on the front page we can have some better idea of what people are and are not doing.
Permit me introduce the word "funnel" into the discussion (for those previously unacquainted with the term in this context). The idea is that a landing page provides links to the major subdivision of a site by topical areas of interest. Each subdivision offers successively more focused direction to sub-topics, funneling the visitor ever more explicitly toward the desired content. This model does not preclude alternative "quick-links" that provide direct access to the more focused content for the more sophisticated or returning visitor. I appreciate that having a "surf-ever-deeper" to find your goal model is unappealing in some ways, but this brings us back to the interaction design issue. I suspect that each of us owns preconceptions and biases as to the nature of what visitors seek. However, these biases are based in personal preferences not necessarily accurately reflective of what the majority of visitors truly want or expect. On this list alone, over the past, few days, I have seen more than one request that reflects a very limited grasp of geek-dom as it relates to the usage of the website as a tool to access the content. Newbies need things that we do not.
Definitely +1. On that note, I'd prefer news to be on a separate news page (and possibly get a large banner on the front page, as Mairin might have mentioned before).
I still favor the involvement of REAL user-interaction design folks. Is there a hard deadline on "the final solution"?
Nope. It'd be nice to have something ready for F9, but we are still free to make changes afterwards.
Thanks, Ricky