Hi Martin, On 14 Dec 2009, at 8:07 pm, Martin Albisetti wrote: > Hi Martin, thanks for sending this in, it's great to see people > propose solutions to UI problems. > I've been Launchpad's UI guy for a bit over a year, so at this stage > I'm to blame for most of the problems.
Honestly, I think you've done quite a good job improving Launchpad over the past year, it was much worse. > We have yet to break down each page into this detail of target > audience, but we have developed a few Personas: > https://dev.launchpad.net/Personas Thanks, that will be very useful. > So, the reason why we dropped that top bar after 4 years, is because > we wanted to bring projects to the foreground. The fact that you are > in Launchpad is secondary, and we wanted the design to reflect that. > It has created some confusion to the people that span cross multiple > projects, although there is a change in the navigation that may > address this to a certain level by letting you jump between projects > from the breadcrumbs. > We also chose to start dropping the coloring scheme for each > application, as most users we tested on didn't really understand the > difference. Ah, that's fair enough. I felt it helped border the site, but I can see where you're coming from. > The homepage was something we left for last, and did not really excel > at it. We're in the process of finishing up some re-branding > discussions internally, and the home page will be the first thing we > tackle. > That said, I think this design is much cleaner than the current one > and I'd support such a change. If you're interested in getting your > hands dirty with Launchpad's code, I'd be happy to help you out. > Note that the home page has different content depending of whether > you're logged in or not. I'd definitely be interested in doing some work on the Launchpad code at some point to help out with some of this stuff. > In our first roll-out we had a line that separated them as well, but > the page felt even more cluttered so we dropped it. Yeah, the line is more there to make it seem like the section links aren't floating. I feel the links and branding get in each others way on the current layout. > The get involved boxes where actually placed on one of the most > prominent places on the page. The bazaar page is a pretty extreme > example in the sense that it has so many files for download and really > pushed down that content. The problem is really limiting the number of > files to something sane and usable. > In one of the iterations I placed those links in the exact same place, > but since descriptions vary a lot in size I ended up placing it in a > more consistent place where you could learn to go to when jumping > around prokects. Yeah, I see that point. I might move it back to the sidebar. > That is because it hasn't been rolled out to more places ;) > The primary action on that page is to download the software, that's > why it's so prominent. The implementation for multiple files I agree, > it's not great. Originally, we wanted to detect your OS and offer > accordingly. That feature dropped off the radar but I still miss it. I feel that you can make something prominent by using positioning rather than making it quite different visually. OS detection would probably help a lot in the multiple file case. > The reason why breadcrumbs are where they are, is because they are > related to the title. > We've had a few different iterations on this and the current situation > seemed to balance out best in all pages. I'll try and dig up some of > the wireframes. Right, I just felt that the information about who reported it was more useful being under the title. I did only do this small subsection of pages. > So we used to have an "actions portlet" in previous versions of > Launchpad, and like you can see in your design, it just became a > christmas tree of options. > The rule we decided to follow was: if it can be done inline, the > action should be where the content is. I see your point. I think the issue is that the actions blend in to the content too much at the moment. If they were more distinct visually then it would be easier. > Moving the "bugtask table" below the description has been talked about > many many times. > The problem with doing so is that for first time visits to bugs, it > makes sense, but subsequent visits, where you change statuses, assign > people, etc, it doesn't. It complicates finding the information and > interacting with it. Having it on top seemed like a fair trade off for > people using the application heavily and one-time users. This could work if the description was given the same visual separation. At the moment it seems to be in a mush of text underneath the table. > Please continue to be encouraged to send in such detailed emails. > Slightly related, you may be interested in a mailing list about > usability in open source: https://edge.launchpad.net/~ayatana Well this first set of mockups was simply to show some simple ideas for improving readability. I'm wanting to go over the same pages and do a drastic redesign and start completely from scratch, which would probably take a LOT more work to implement than many of the changes in these current mockups (which would largely consist of editing CSS). I'll definitely take a look at that mailing list Thanks Martin _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
