The Signpost and the HUC front page

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Andrew
Sayers<andrew-bugs.launchpad.net at pileofstuff.org> wrote:
> I've put a draft of the signpost-modified HUC main page up here:
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UserDocumentation/PageDiscussion/Draft
>
> Actually, I put it up last week, and just now realised that nobody's
> monitoring that page :s
>
> Would anybody object to removing the comment on the main page that says
> to make changes in /UserDocumentation/PageDiscussion/Draft?  It seems
> rather redundant if changes should be discussed here anyway.

Yes, please remove it - we don't currently use PageDiscussion pages
because for our purposes wikipages aren't very well suited to
discussions - the mailing list is a lot better.

> Also, does anybody that objects to the new draft?  If not, I'll update
> the main page on Monday.

I have a few comments on the implementation. First, just a minor one
on the formatting, my first impression looking at the layout is that
the first three links are supposed to be related to Support (as they
match the level of the top signpost) and the second three links are
supposed to be related to Development (as they match the level of the
bottom signpost). Secondly, it's not obvious to me what the difference
between the top links and the bottom links is, i.e. they are not
distinct concepts and seem to overlap and I'm not clear on what I
should be clicking on. For example, if I'm looking for help, I might
click on the first link (help), or I might click on any of the fourth
to sixth links. I see this as a slight conceptual problem with how the
pages and information are laid out. I think it's artificial to have
two different pages for "questions" and "answers", because ultimately,
all questions have answers.

Ultimately, what the signpost set of pages appears to be is a way to
present help and community pages to people looking for information.
That's a very valuable and laudable aim, but I can't help but think
that it's duplicative to have a separate "Signpost" area in the wiki
from the existing landing pages (which are themselves intended to be
"signposts"). That might be confusing for users, rather than helpful.
Perhaps the way to look at this is simply to ask "How can we make it
easier for users landing on our pages to figure out where to go next?"
Once we have the answers to that, we can think about how to implement
a coherent and unified landing page approach.

What do you think? This might be another good topic for a team meeting.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF