Hi,
I hope the discussion can continue in this manner... I will only adress the issues not addressed by Miika who I agree with. The login box will indeed be replaced by a search, maybe even accompanied with a little icon... but Christian hasn't made it work yet...
Those three boxes are the entire extent of the information available on the page on an initial screen. That, and links to the components. But there is no link to tech support, contact, mailing lists, documentation, latest news (unless that's what that green box is supposed to be).There is this usability 'rule' that one should minimize the ways of getting somewhere. Make these ways logical and a user will more quickly understand the structure of the site, therefore find information better. This is why the design focusses more on access via the horizontal navigation bar. Can't point you to literature without searching for myself (where timing test have occurred), but I've read it more than once and believe this is not more than logical.
Users may or may not realize that there is stuff below the screen. It is certainly not evident when I first load the page.The 'philosophy' behind this is the fact that the lower part is simply less important for the average user. Furthermore I think the suggestion made by Jacqueline; namely removing the News box and placing the In the media box to the right of the article excerpts would help a lot. I just designed around the requested content, so if this is allowed to be removed, I will.
If you do scroll down, you find a tiny bit of information. Not much though. There is nothing that would tell the user how to get help, or where to get a manual (which is often requested on the users lis), or how to even report a bug!Wouldn't you click on support or new user if you were looking for help or a manual? Bug reports should not be made by newbies, so best way to report them is via some other person who is giving support... this is the new user situation. Experienced users should login first by clicking on 'My Pages' and they can report a bug from there.
The best I can say about this design is that the picture in the centre is pretty. But that doesn't justify the removal if imortant information, or introducing ambiguity, or discriminating against users with low-contrast vision.I would really like to know if you can follow my way of reasoning about the menu bar... and in what extend you agree to this...
Has any of these problems been fixed in Maarten's recent proposalOne of them. He replaced "new" by "new user".
(http://www2.hku.nl/~maarten/external/OpenOffice.org/proposal3.0/)?
;-)
g.,
Maarten
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