I have been working away at this over the past week, and I'm starting to realise that simplicity and minimalism is sometimes more tricky to get right than complexity and overabundance.
Before going further, I thought I'd post some initial analysis of the problems identified (thanks Tim!), and make some comments on how these issues could be improved. Please recognize that I do think the whole site and wiki is great, both in terms of content and design, I hope this comes across as constructive criticism, I'm totally not trying to detract from the hard work that people have put in which I am very appreciative of. Think of the feedback as adaptive strategies to suit a growing audience. Also feel free to criticise me for any irrelevant assumptions and prejudices you see here. It would be good to pare down exactly what incremental things can be done on the main site, that maximise usefulness for the microformats community, while minimizing effort to organize, write, and implement. === Homepage (http://microformats.org) === The homepage is structured very much like a blog, which has both drawbacks and benefits. The best thing about this layout is that it is bold, intuitive, fast to skim, and doesn't overwhelm with navigation. The drawbacks are mostly related to the brevity of the links and descriptions. It looks like a complete site at first, it's not immediately clear exactly what each link is about, nor that most of the links are jumping off to the wiki. For example, as Joe Average User, I would know based on the homepage text "People and Organizations: hCard", that this is a data format for displaying people and organizations, but then what? The link takes me to a complicated table of contents entitled "Draft Specification". I have to scroll down to see anything more concrete, and it's not immediately clear where to begin reading, nor how I can start using the format, without having to spend a few minutes hunting around the wiki for information, or searching for a tutorial somebody wrote and published elsewhere. If I'm not familiar with blogs or wikis (maybe a client heard about hCard, and asked me to implement it), it's going to take even longer. === About Section (http://microformats.org/about/) === The about page itself provides an excellent visual introduction to microformats. The diagram is displayed prominently, and gives an immediate context to where microformats lie in the "space" of semantic markup technology. The bullet points do a good job of explaining what is unique about microformats, especially emphasising the importance of process, and adapting to existing behaviour. What is less clear is exactly how this page functions within the rest of the site context. It seems this "tip of the iceberg" is aimed at a very specific audience (those who responded immediately, when the site went live last year). But what about those new to microformats? The content here is conceptual and general, and makes too many assumptions for a general audience (I see what microformats *are*, but what do they *do*, what are the immediate *benefits* for my website?). Apart from the diagram image, this page doesn't really reiterate the fact that they are built on top of XHTML. Stating the obvious? Perhaps, but I've learned time and time again not to assume that just because the information is on a site somewhere, that people will read it, or get it, even if they do read it. The other weakness of this section is that despite the landing page providing a general overview, the sub-pages in this section are actually more meta/socially oriented ("People", "Thanks"). It is extremely important to provide respect and credit to all the people involved in pushing this initiative forward, but again, this organizational context is not immediately obvious for new users. The expectation of an "about" section is to find all the simple, dumb facts. === Discuss (http://microformats.org/discuss/) === A spartan section, but very useful and well presented. Could potentially be more friendly and inviting? I know the notion of "community" is overused, but might still be a good idea to reflect it here somehow. === Code (http://microformats.org/code/ === Possibly useful to some people, but really doesn't have a lot to offer in comparison with the information on the wiki. and is very skewed in favour of XFN. I also find the labelling of this section slightly confusing, in that I would never expect a non-programmer to think that the term "Code" is aimed at them, yet the links on this page are generally of interest to non-programmers. "Tools" might be a more accurate description, which doesn't scare off those who are tech savy, but don't consider themselves hard-core coders. === Analysis & Suggestions === A very common question from new people on the mailing list goes like "Is there a microformat for X?" A (not always obvious) variation of the same question is "Here's my proposal for a microformat for X". It seems like the answer to almost all of these questions and proposals is "A combination of Y microformat and a semantic XHTML compound will solve your problem". >From a meta perspective, these questions seem to be stirred from a mismatch in vocabulary between defining a problem ("my content type is X") and defining a specific microformat oriented solution ("use hAtom and hCard"). The irony is that content types and usage of the formats is already very well documented on the current website, in terms of the current blog sidebar, and the faq and use wiki pages. So why do smart people continue to miss this? It strikes me that with a general audience, it is far more important for content to communicate as closely as possible to mental models of content. This means that information like "hCard is a 1-to-1 mapping of the vCard standard in XHTML" is far less important than information like "hCard is a standard approach to marking up contact details in XHTML", and the navigation and organization of the site should reflect this. I know some of you may think this sounds trivial or stupid, but it's important to appreciate that even the most literate people are busy, have limited attention spans, and often prefer to skim web pages rather than pore over them word by word. The homepage should provide immediate visual cues for those who have a vague idea of what microformats are, but are looking for a direct and pragmatic value proposition. The current featured text explains what microformats are, but not why they are useful or how simple they are to implement. A "Get Started Now" link would be a great compliment or replacement for the existing "Find Out More" link, acting as a subtle call to action, and communicating to readers that they can potentially implement one or several microformats with their existing content in a matter of minutes. http://microformats.org/wiki/use is a perfect example of the sort of content that might lie behind such a "Getting Started" link. A logical progression from this, is the consideration of the more creative uses of generalized formats such as hCard. It may not be immediately obvious, even to those who already know what hCard is, just how broad the range of things that can be done with it. For example, how would I, as Joe Average Designer, know that I could easily use hCard to mark up a logo? I'd have to somehow find my way to: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-examples#3.5.3_LOGO_Type_Definition . Landing straight on the homepage, my chances of finding this information directly are *not good*. Incidentally, this hcard-examples page is great, but perhaps falls more in the realm of "reference" than "tutorial". Even a "This is what you can do" oriented section of text, linking into this examples page would be a great step towards encouraging new designers to play. === Where To From Here === I have some more related material to accompany this analysis (a site map), which I'll send through when I get a chance this week. If we look at doing incremental updates, my thoughts are that the greatest mileage would come from hand-picking the best introductory content from the wiki, and condensing it for the main site pages. If Tantek, Ryan, or anyone else feels that this is *not* a good way to approach the content process, please advise me, otherwise I'll go ahead and start tweaking some of the writing to suit, and pass it on to Tim, who has created a mockup of the main site for testing how pages look. It would also be great to hear from anyone who feels there is something immediate and obvious missing from the website, or has something that they would really like to see! Regards, Mark _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
