Hi Graham...
Graham wrote:
(I hope people will excuse me for posting this here as well as the wiki, but
it seems there is little if any discussion taking place there )
As the old saying goes "You can take a Horse to water but you can't make him
drink"
And therein it seems, lies much of our problem.
There is I believe a confusion of goals at the homepage.
yes...
We are getting people to the download page but that is not the end goal.
You have to give the horse a reason to drink, Either, make him thirsty, make
the water desirable beyond his need for water or wait till he is thirsty
before you take him there.
The three tenets of Marketing
*Create a need
*Create a desire
*Fill a present need
OK, and here is where our confusion begins. Is the homepage about
"marketing" or simply resources? We are, in some ways, like a commercial
entity trying to sell a product, and in many ways, not. The dicotomy
of marketing vs technical was brought up about a week ago by someone
lese (can't remember who now), and I guess we should have discussed this
aspect in more detail.
Right now we do none of these well, we simply shove the Horse at the trough,
only to make it doubly difficult, we blindfold him, block up his nose and
force him to sup it through a straw after he has learned that drinking some
types of water.will be bad for him.
well...I personally feel this is overcritical, but that's just my opinion
People come to a website for two main reasons
*Curiosity
*To solve a problem
They will leave for more reasons:
*Their curiosity has been satisfied and they leave informed
*They find a solution to their problem
*They can't satisfy that curiosity within a reasonable time and they leave
frustrated
*They can't find the solution or it is not obvious and they leave frustrated
*Fear of the unknown
Our problem is right now, and the discussions up to this point are reinforcing
this point, we are not asking the User what he wants to do we are telling
them what we expect them to do, We inform them where to download, but we
don't give them information that will make them feel comfortable about
hitting the download button, or to stretch our metaphor a bit further, we
talk to our horse about the trough but not about how good the water is, while
the horse is still worried about drowning..
I think we're all concerned about ALL of these aspects, but we're our
presentation is flawed. There seems to be an emerging philosophical
discussion, on this list and elsewhere, about just HOW MUCH information
a homepage should provide (that old how many clicks will it take Marta
to really get what she wants), vs a more uncluttered presentation. This,
in essence, is what we're grappling with I think. I, for one, having
used open source products for quite some time now, don't have a good
feel for our "average" user if you want to know the truth. Maybe one of
the user support folks could weigh in more here.
So I've put together a draft of a front page continuing on the simplicity idea
which I'm a fan of. The difference is that we provide "Answers to the
Question"
"You have arrived at OpenOffice.org what would you like to do now?"
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/mwiki/images/a/a3/Home_page_draft_11-27.jpg
Well...this is actually a somewhat reasonable approach. I kind of like
RJ's version(s) a bit better, also simple, because it seemed to provide
a bit more sophistication than your design but I think the basic idea is
the same.
I do feel, as some others have also said here, that *some* additional
elements, like a few "news" items, are good PR.
Native Language would be another answer if we don't get a users language from
their browser. I like oooauthors.org method of doing this, but I'm not sure
of the practicality of a page with 80 odd language choices.
I like the Quintura "Mindmapping" method (www.quintura.com : type in a
search item you'll see what I mean) of giving choices perhaps we could figure
a way to narrow the choices by location.
Cheers
GL
--
============================================================
Kay Schenk
"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are
taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling."
-- Paula Poundstone
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