[RFC] Home page refresh

[Wichmann, Mats D]

Sniping from the cheap seats, sorry... just wanted to add 
another viewpoint.


bazaar-bounces at lists.canonical.com wrote:
> Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:
> 
>> I can see where you're going with the three screenshots, but they
>> look a bit noisy, partly because they're using slightly different and
>> jarring background shades. I think also the text under it is
>> unnecessary: we say in "Get Bazaar" that it's cross-platform and it's
>> pretty obvious you can click a screenshot to see more.
> 
> I disagree. The screenshot thumbnails don't obviously indicate that
> they're representing different platforms. The text makes that clear; I
> would not have used the thumbnails to discover that.

No, I don't find it obvious either.  Indeed it's not obvious now
as the text indicates four platforms and there are three screenshots,
you wouldn't mentally make that mapping.


In general, I find this effort a little nicer than the live home page,
as it seems to be a bit more economical with space, but even now
there's this giant band at the top which says Bazaar in a lot more
space than is aesthetically pleasing; the size seems to be controlled
by the size of the thumbnail(s) which is a weird design attribute,
you'd expect it to be controlled by the main visual element, the
logo-sign (as it is taller than the text) - this revised effort
has not-as-tall screencaps so I find the look a lot more pleasing 
as the caps are close to the logo's size, but this all seems too
dominant as it's conveying so little.

In common to both designs is something I'm sure the design phase
must have kicked around, but I find irritating, where you have
three live elements for each of the three main actions, and that
seems an awfully inelegant design to my silly brain.  What I
mean is the stacks:


Get Bazaar       - clickable headline

some text

Icon             - clickable icon, same link as headline

Get Bazaar       - clickable lozenge, same link as headline


in terms of /vertical space/, I'd like to see only one live action
element, not three stacked (I can't mock up to see how two
horizontally, i.e. next to each other, would look).


For both of these questions I think I'd fall back on the general
style guideline that as valuable as the real estate of the
"first page" of the home page is (that is, the stuff the average
user's browser is likely to see without scrolling in either
direction) if there's an element whose purpose is not clear, 
such that it has to be explained to be useful, then it's been 
misdesigned.