[RFC] Home page refresh

[Martin Pool]

On 18 February 2010 12:53, Wichmann, Mats D <mats.d.wichmann at intel.com> wrote:
> 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.

My point was more that three incongruous screenshots plus some text is
not a great way to convey that it's cross-platform.  Perhaps platform
icons under the download area would be a better way.

What we were originally aiming for was one screenshot, big enough that
you can actually see stuff more than just "it's a screenshot", and
then arrows to flip through different pictures.

> 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).

Yes, I think we should just drop the icons and buttons and have the heading.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>