[Haskell-cafe] Design for 2010.2.x series Haskell Platform site

Christopher Done chrisdone at googlemail.com
Sat Jul 17 11:02:40 EDT 2010


On 17 July 2010 16:21, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Webdesign for an open source project is pretty much doomed from the
> beginning.  Design requires a few opinionated people rather than
> democracy.  This is design is a result of a haskell-cafe thread which
> naturally involved a lot of bikeshedding.  It has its flaws, but it's
> certainly better than the old design and I know of no programming
> language website that has a particular great design, either.

This is why I mentioned that with theme support, we can provide lots
of alternatives and then vote on the best one. Like the logo. That's
democracy.

> Sure, there's always room for improvement.  Usability tests would be
> nice, but they're also time consuming.

This is what I said:

> On 17 July 2010 13:31, Christopher Done <chrisdone at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Sadly nobody has the time nor inclination to do proper web development
>> and actually test designs and get feedback, so I suppose we're working
>> with the time we've got.

On 17 July 2010 16:21, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Fighting CSS to do what you
> want it to and make it work on at least all modern browsers is
> annoying and a huge time sink as well.

I don't know about that; Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE8 are
pretty much equivalent from a CSS2 stand-point. It's not like anything
fancy is needed.

On 17 July 2010 16:21, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I put the search field on the
> right (it's not very useful anyway), but otherwise I disagree with
> your requested changes.

I wasn't requesting any changes, I was demonstrating that I could pick
at parts of the design but in the end it's down to user testing:

> On 17 July 2010 13:31, Christopher Done <chrisdone at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> But also if we liked it, regardless, we should do user testing (checkout Don't Make Me
>> Think, Rocket Surgery Made Easy).

Then I said no one's going to do user testing, so maybe a vote would
be the best:

> On 17 July 2010 13:31, Christopher Done <chrisdone at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Sadly nobody has the time nor inclination to do proper web development
>> and actually test designs and get feedback, so I suppose we're working
>> with the time we've got. At least with theme support, we can write a
>> load of themes, and then perhaps do a vote on what people think makes
>> the best impression as a default. That seems most efficient and fair.
>> I'll certainly make a couple.

On 17 July 2010 16:21, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I put the search field on the
> right (it's not very useful anyway), but otherwise I disagree with
> your requested changes.

But now you've put the login on the left, which should also be on the right:

1. https://github.com/
2. http://ubuntuforums.org/
3. http://www.reddit.com/
4. http://www.amazon.com/
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
6. http://www.youtube.com/
7. http://www.facebook.com/
8. http://twitter.com/
9. http://www.myspace.com/
10. http://www.ebay.com/
11. http://wordpress.com/
12. http://www.flickr.com/explore/
13. http://dictionary.reference.com/

See how the login is always on the top right? It's a usability
standard. You can see how the sites focused on searching (google,
youtube, twitter, myspace, ebay) have the search bar in the middle,
but the ones where searching is secondary is always on the right. Logo
on the left, search and login on the right, menu on the top or the
left (or on the right if you want to freak your visitors out).

On 17 July 2010 16:21, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The logo on the left is inspired by http://www.alistapart.com.  It
> works quite well on pages that are not the home page.  The main
> feature of the design is that it scales quite nicely to different
> screen sizes (on recent enough browsers) -- try resizing your window.
> Also note that the exact contents can be edited (and probably shoud
> be).

It actually fits in on A List Apart (same theme).

But, again, these criticisms are academic; design it how you like.
Once the new Wiki's up we can submit patches/modifications or
different themes and vote.

One easy way to do user testing which is actually useful is through a
site like reddit or Hacker News. I got valuable feedback from Hacker
News, because the people were my target audience, i.e.,
none-Haskellers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1393593 It's
possible to use the same method for haskell.org. It just requires some
follow through to actually do what people request.


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