Hi Launchpad,
Jakob Nielsen's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend
most of their time on other websites." The hypothesis being that users
form their expectations about how a website will work based on their
experience using other websites.
There are a number of general of things that I think don't help us make
a good first impression in this regard. Here are three bigs things I
think we should to start with:
Global header/navigation - in the past this was removed to make the
project pages into more individual sites. In practice Launchpad is about
cross project collaboration and a global header helps to tie these
projects together. This will only become more important as we push to
make Launchpad more about how the user interacts with projects.
Proper sub-navigation - our facets (bugs, blueprints etc.) are a rabbit
warren of pages. With proper sub-navigation for each facet we can clean
this up. Some individual pages will require a third level of navigation.
Subdomains - while I can understand the reasoning behind our apps having
been moved to individual subdomains, our apps are now too integrated
within the site to considered individual apps. Individual subdomains
work well for separate apps (think docs.google.com, calendar.google.com)
where those apps are distinct and have little integration. Our apps are
now just different parts of the same site (I can't just log into
translations.launchpad.net), in-fact we want to encourage integration
between our apps, not make them isolated. Subdomains as parts of the
same site are unnatural way of working, they make for some very
confusing navigation at first as well as making URL hacking really
difficult. We will also get speed improvements due to a single SSL cert,
not having to load media for each domain etc. We can easily map our urls
over to something like launchpad.net/launchpad/+bugs,
launchpad.net/launchpad/+translations etc.
I will start to address these issues, with the help of some of you, and
pushing to get developer cycles to fix them where I can't.
There are quite a few smaller places where we don't necessarily do
things in the most normal way. I want to tackle these too, but these are
the big sweeping changes I would like to make first.
Cheers,
Huw
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