The Signpost and the HUC front page

[Matthew East]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Andrew
Sayers<andrew-bugs.launchpad.net at pileofstuff.org> wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
>
> I've updated the pages based on your feedback.  Let me know what you think.

{snip}

> The bottom three questions are designed to let people browse the
> signpost like a FAQ if they want to.  We chose three separate pages
> because we felt they represented the three types of things that people
> would want to browse for.  I've shunted those options from the front
> page to the "none of the above" answer, where they will be visible to
> people that click on any "none of the above" link.

I like the division of links at the top level now - it's clear where
to click depending on the question that the person has. I'm still not
convinced about the distinction between "questions" and "answers" in
the subpages, because for me they are two sides of the same coin (i.e.
the user has a question and the pages should provide the answer to
that question) but it's not as prominent now so it's definitely an
improvement.

> The signpost is currently dominated by content that was previously part
> of the front page, because I've added a lot of content that would be
> removed from the front page if the signpost went on there.  In the
> long-run, the idea is to point people at any Ubuntu resource, based on
> questions from [[Signpost/PageDiscussion]], and from the
> #ubuntu-signpost IRC channel.  I'm personally not that comfortable
> putting actual help into the signpost, partially because of the
> duplicative issue you talked about.

Yes, I agree that actual help shouldn't be there - in the end it is a
way to point people at existing material, as I understand it.

> You could see this as an evidence-based attempt to answer the question
> "how can we make it easier for users landing on our pages to figure out
> where to go next?".  I'd personally prefer to let the signpost gather
> evidence for a few months before trying to impose any greater structure.

Ok, that's fine by me. What sort of ideas do you have for gathering
evidence? Just watching the PageHits page, or something more subtle?
We might be able to get hold of the google analytics information for
the website but as to whether that would show us whether the signposts
are working, I'm not sure.

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