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Re: [sup-talk] New website design for sup - preview



Hi,

I'm sorry, I don't buy the "intelligent/experienced/developer users don't
care about the frontend design" idea.

What I'm talking about is, for lack of a better term, "professionalism". If
anyone comes to a website, regardless of how experienced they are, the
decision is already made. If there isn't any apparent effort gone into the
user facing landing page, the user might get the impression that the
project isn't mature or worthy enough for active usage as well.

A funny story I just wrote to someone about:
Someone wrote a python web framework called "Denied":
http://denied.immersedcode.org/

Go check the website. It looks very interesting - a new minimalist
lightweight python web framework - complete with code snippets and
screencasts. It got a lot of positive response from the intelligent Hacker
News and Github communities.

Turns out it was an April Fools' joke. But that proves a point - people are
highly influenced by the quality of the tool.

Excerpts from Rogutės Sparnuotos's message of Mon Apr 12 01:03:58 +0530 2010:
> Why is the original site bad? I think that it provides more information
> and takes less vertical space. Only the screenshots could be bigger
> (and perhaps 4 instead of 6?).
Why is vertical space bad? I am not saying that the old website is bad. It
isn't immediately obvious what the exact _killer functionality_ of sup is,
unless you take a very close look.

My design makes it _immediately obvious_ why sup is going to positively
affect their lives, and reinforces it with visual feedback.

If you notice, the ruby language does the same thing:
http://ruby-lang.org
They don't need to show a code sample, but they do it anyway as people need
to _see_ what is so great about it.

> It looks like what you are proposing is not a new website, but a shift in
> targeted audience. You seem to be addressing the naive user, while
> forgetting the more technical ones. I would suggest to aim for the middle,
> going for the aesthetic looks (or at least matching the style of the
> homepage and the wiki), but keeping the technical tongue (is there any
> need to change the content of the current website?).
While I'm a programmer now, I spent a very large amount of time learning
about Usability. Usability is what makes GMail and Sup so much better to
use. And usability is not only about making buttons bigger or keyboard
shortcuts nicer.

It's a lot about putting the important information in the places where
people are more likely to look - so that people avoid having to look and
give up.

> There is this sentence at http://sup.rubyforge.org/:
> "
>   The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds
>   everywhere.
> "
> 
> And you seem to agree with it in a later mail:
> > Perhaps you want to shorten it for the benefit of those who're blindly
> > copy-pasting?
> > > Then they shouldn't be using sup in the first place :)
> 
> But you do contradict yourself and that statement with the proposed

By the extension of your logic, the ruby gems website:
http://rubygems.org/
Needs to be coded solely in <h1> and <h2> as well. I'm sure that the
website is not the way it currently is because it's intended to be that way
to attract the targeted audience, but rather because the devs just didn't
have the interest to work on the design.

> 1. Your design doesn't work without javascript:
Agreed. Nor does the rest of the Internet.

>     * Why would an overview of the features need animation? What does the
>       animation give to the user, besides hiding a handful of text?
>       Perhaps a feeling that the software in question might have hidden
>       features?
The animation gives the user nothing. It merely makes it seem slightly more
appealing. Also, the user can find out more about specific features that
interests him/her.

> 2. First 700px of the page show nothing useful, except for a screenshot
>    and big letters.
Have you heard of "minimalism"? There's a reason why clean desks and rooms
are more enjoyable than cluttered dirty ones. It's not a developer/end-user
thing it's a human thing.

> 3. Some very useful, even if technical, pieces information has been lost in
>    conversion:
>    "Handle massive amounts of email."
> 
>    "
>      The current version of Sup is 0.11, released 2010-03-07. This is a beta
>      release. It supports mbox and Maildir mailstores.
>    "
>    
>    "
>      you can clone the git repository like so: 
>      git clone git://gitorious.org/sup/mainline.git
>    "
I just hacked together this website for a few hours, even despite having my
own projects to work on. I will be putting the source code up on github
soon. I never mentioned this is the final design, let alone the final
content.

> 4. You have replaced the credit to Xapian and RubyMail with the credit to
>    the authors of the website :)
Again, that slipped my notice. Thank you for pointing it out. I'll put it
up there. I am required to put up the main author's website because of
attribution laws. But I will be removing my own name as my contribution
isn't significant enough to merit credit.

> As for the GMail guide, wouldn't it be very useful in the wiki?
It's been on the wiki for four months. I wrote it. It's very hard to find
on the wiki.

I hope this again, reinforces my "don't make everything harder to find just
because you target advanced users" belief. Instead of taking the most
important information and putting it somewhere you'll have to google around
for, put it right where people would expect to find it.

tl;dr: It has nothing to do with a target audience. Saying a more pleasing
website does not appeal to hackers is mild stereotyping, and I am not sure
whether to be flattered or offended.

I've seen this issue a lot before - we write awesome, incredible code and
put it up on a wiki, and don't put in even a hundredth of effort doing
design as it's not intellectually satisfying. So you've got great projects
which fail to distinguish themselves from the crowd - on wikis and github
accounts around the world, there are great projects just like sup nobody
takes notice of.

And then you wonder why nobody is interested in your project. It happened
to me and my projects as well.

What I'm hoping is that if someone visits the sup site, they should be
excited and interested to try it out - and having something mildly
professional and something that seems to have some effort put into it will
surely help. More people trying it out is better for all of us.

This is just a proposed facelift. The devs decide what happens and what
doesn't. I just posted to get some constructive feedback and I'm sure I'll
get some real soon.

Thanks,
Anirudh
-- 
http://anirudhsanjeev.org

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