RFC: Bazaar Web site Home Page Redesign

[Emma Jane]

Wow! What great feedback, Thank You. Two short responses to specific comments 
are below, a much longer overall response is available at the bottom.

regards,
emma


On Thursday 06 August 2009 2:07:45 am Ben Finney wrote:
> A significant factor in choosing software tools is the license terms
> under which I will receive the tool. I spend far too long on many
> products hunting down the license terms on the website.
>
> This should be on the front page (as a link to the actual license text),
> at least as prominent as the product's short description, to ensure that
> a newcomer can quickly check that criterion.

Good point! Maybe the license could be in the copyright footer as well? Right 
now the footer just has (c) 2008 Canonical Ltd. But this could be extended to 
include, "Bazaar is distributed under the GNU GPL." with a link to the license 
information for the the project.


On Thursday 06 August 2009 12:44:53 am "Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
> You absolutely :-) need an exit ramp for "Launchpad", large enough
> to make it clear that use of one is really enhanced by the other.  I
> could also imagine a "Featured Developer/User/etc" corner, but that
> gets boring and moldy in about 6 weeks unless somebody takes
> responsibility for changing it about monthly.  Maybe a link list
> including Canonical itself and Ubuntu (as well as Launchpad).

I agree that hosting needs to an entry point from front page into the site. I 
also think the guts of hosting information needs to be dealt with on its own 
page. I've added a note that "hosting" needs to be a special page just like 
"BzrDeveloper" is right now. We've got lots to say about hosting, let's not 
try and shoe horn it into the front page!


Overall response:
It's very important that we don't try to accomplish too much on the front 
page. The front page is "just" an entry into the Web site. It is not a 
solution on its own. We need to entice people to click in. To deal with the 
question of "who" we're dealing with, I've written up a list of people that I 
think are "vulnerable front page visitors." These are people that we need to 
entice to click further, as opposed to motivated users who need to find the 
links they're looking for (or who, more realistically, came in a side door via 
a search engine).

Please take a look at:
http://bazaar-vcs.org/BazaarPersonas
You are welcome and encouraged to update the document to reflect the visitors 
that you think are most vulnerable and that we need to entice past the first 
page. In the spirit of avoiding that whole click to read annoyance, I've also 
pasted the information here.




Bazaar Personas

Front page

Who comes to the front page of the Bazaar Web site? We need to know this to 
get the BazaarHomePageRedesign right. Please edit this document as you see fit.

Let's pretend that Bazaar is a product you can buy. That allows us to use fun 
and vomit inducing terms like "sales conversion" and "unique selling 
proposition." The front page of the Bazaar site must pitch solutions to 
potential customers in a way that pulls them in past the front page where the 
real meat of the site happens. To know the right way to funnel people in, we 
need to know "who" we're dealing with. This document outlines different types 
of people who are landing on the front page that are potential customers. 
We'll use these personas to figure out how to funnel each type of person to an 
appropriate area of the site where they will ultimately choose to use Bazaar 
because it rocks.

Aside: I am going to start with the very big assumption that most people 
looking to solve a specific problem are doing a search and have landed "inside" 
the Web site, not on the front page.

Kris
    * Occupation: IT Manager
    * Chris is an IT Manager at a medium sized firm. He has 20 programmers in 
his department and is getting fed up with using his current version control 
system. Or rather, his programmers are fed up with it and that means they're 
spending more time complaining than working. A few programmers have suggested 
various version control systems and he's checking out the various Web sites. 
Although he understands all the technical terminology, he's never used a DVCS 
and wants to know how it will affect the productivity of his team. It's very 
important to Chris that the software not get in the way. He needs to rely on 
the product and be able to deal with a professional who understands the system 
if his team gets hung up on a problem. In addition to his programmers, Chris 
has a few graphic designers that contribute to his projects on occasion. He's 
curious to know what the options are for each of Windows, OSX and Linux based-
distros, but this is not necessarily a deal breaker for him.
    * Needs to find: commercial support options, workflow models, integration 
with existing tools 

Randy
    * Occupation: Software Developer
    * Randy is completely sick and tired of using CVS. He really wants his 
team to switch, but there is resistance to learning a new set of tools. Randy 
wants to switch to a DVCS, but needs to prove to his boss and his team that 
Bazaar is the right option. His team uses Windows and OSX and are familiar 
with the command line, but tend to use GUI tools/IDEs for most of their work. 
Ideally Randy will be able to "show" his team how awesome Bazaar is by 
pointing at various pages in the Web site. He's sold on Bazaar from hanging 
out in IRC and on the mailing list, but now he needs to convince everyone else 
on his team.
    * Needs to find: screenshots of GUI clients, available plugins for IDEs, 
description of DVCS with workflow examples, intro tutorials that will show his 
team how easy it is to use Bazaar. 

Dawn
    * Occupation: Developer and Freelance Hacker
    * Dawn is a freelance hacker. In her day job she works for The Man on 
large scale banking software. It pays the bills, but she thinks it sucks. 
She'd rather be working on open source software projects. She's got a couple 
of projects she contributes to, all of which use a different VCS. She knows the 
basic commands for all of them, but gets most of her information from 
tutorials she finds via Google searches. For the most part she doesn't care 
where she gets her HOWTOs, as long as they work. A few months ago she started 
helping out with bugs on Launchpad and has been using Bazaar because of it. 
She's been using Unfuddle (with subversion) for a couple of her freelance 
contracts, but is thinking about switching over to Bazaar and contributing 
back to the project.
    * Needs to find: product licensing, sense of the developer community, 
advanced user and developer documentation 

With these people in mind, let's take a look at the front page wireframe again 
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/emmajane/3791477132/):

== Above the fold

Solutions/Features - Solution-oriented, marketing speak
    * Kris needs to see how Bazaar can solve the problems his team is 
currently having with his existing DVCS. Out of all of the regions on the 
site, this is the most "marketing friendly."
    * Randy skims over this area initially looking for screenshots of GUI 
clients he can show his team mates. He comes back to it when he needs 
"stories" to show how DVCS works in real projects.
    * Dawn doesn't really notice or care about this region. 

Help - The Reassurance section
    * Kris needs to see that commercial support options are available, but 
that they aren't the only option. He likes the fact that there is a lot of 
documentation (he doesn't have time to read it, but it sure looks complete).
    * Randy notices there's a help section, but also knows that he'll be the 
one giving most of the support if he convinces people to switch. He's glad the 
documentation looks complete, but is more concerned about seeing how things 
work rather than reading about how they work.
    * Dawn read some documentation once, but thought it kinda sucked. She 
skims this area but knows Google will help her if she really needs it. 

Install - The obvious section
    * Kris and Randy see they can deploy this system on anything that supports 
Python. Cool.
    * Dawn uses the Bazaar package for her distro, she doesn't really care 
about "installation" but she does care about hosting and installing Bazaar on 
her VPS if an alternative to Unfuddle doesn't exist. 

Extend - The will it integrate into my life section
    * Kris and Randy both read this part carefully to see what integration 
options are available for the tools their team is familiar with. They know 
that a lot of "core" programs need to be extended by plugins. They want to 
know what the support is like for these plugins, if they are kept up to date 
with the current release of Bazaar and if their IDE is in the list of 
supported apps.
    * Dawn wants to hack on stuff. She thinks it's really cool there are so 
many plugins and starts thinking about what kind of stuff she might build on 
top of Bazaar. 

== On the fold:
About Bazaar
    * Randy and Dawn scan logos to see which projects they recognize. They 
skim over the links in the text to see if there are any extra words that look 
interesting enough to follow. They already know about DVCS though and are sort 
of blind to walls of text.
    * Kris reads through the "About" text to orient himself in what DVCS is 
all about. He uses the links to jump to relevant parts of the site without 
having to pick them out the nav list which he can now see in the footer. 

Release notes and features
    * Dawn and Randy scan the list to see what the project thinks is a big 
deal. Dawn clicks on one of the links about support for a specific feature that 
she heard someone complain about on one of her project mailing lists. She 
thinks it might be able to solve the needs of the project and is wondering if 
she should tell the project to switch to Bazaar.
    * Kris looks at the list and is relieved to see the development of the 
project is active. Everything in the list is newer than six months. 

Standard footer:
This area should be redundant against the top part of the page as it is 
persistent throughout the site. Based on the feedback to date it may make 
sense to remove Support and replace it with "About." About could include links 
to: Product overview, commercial support options, licensing, hosting.