oVirt site organization

Wed Dec 19 19:18:03 UTC 2012

On 12/19/2012 05:46 AM, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Dave Neary" <dneary at redhat.com> To: infra at ovirt.org Sent:
>> Wednesday, December 19, 2012 10:53:04 AM Subject: Re: oVirt site
>> organization
>> 
>> Hi Alon,
>> 
>> On 12/18/2012 07:59 PM, Alon Bar-Lev wrote:
>>> Not sure this is the right list...
>> 
>> It will do to begin :-) We had design discussions on arch@ before, 
>> and implementation decisions here.
>> 
>>> I think that there is a gap from what user(and developer)
>>> expects to see in open source (or any) site and what we have.
>>> 
>>> We are missing "Support" category, there we should have the user 
>>> lists and a link to bugzilla, and some bugzilla links for
>>> reports (opened bugs for example).
>> 
>> My thinking re "Support" is that it could be a good addition - 
>> currently "Documentation" and "Community" answer the use-case
>> "Help! I'm stuck" - plus, of course, the integrated search box. My
>> only concern is that we already have 6 top-level menu items, and
>> adding another one would make things worse from a usability point
>> of view. Perhaps "Support" could replace one of the other top-level
>> menu items - but which one?
> 
> Support is a must, people look for this word. Drop the community, as
> it has no sense, the whole ovirt is a community.

There is definitely evidence that "Community" - and all the content we
currently have on the [[Community]] page - are something people look for
when they come to an open source project.

> Open source project has usually several top most goals:
> 
> 1. license - IMPORTANT artifact, it is one of the first things people
> are looking in open source project.
> 
> 2. support - IMPORTANT artifact, mailing lists, bugzilla.
> 
> 3. source - IMPORTANT artifacts, this is open source project, the
> source is the center of all activity.

The source is the center of developer activity. These days, people don't
prefer to compile a project from source. That is why [[Download]] is there.

Is there any reason we can't just put "How to obtain source" under the
[[Download]] page?

If I go to a project and see "Source" as a top-level menu item, I'm not
sure if this project is for me - does this mean I have to compile from
source? *ick* Does this mean the project is all about the source code,
and my expertise as an infrastructure or documentation guru isn't welcome?

Users and contributors of all types are the target audience for that
page. Source is of interest to only a subset of those groups, and scary
to another subset.

For those reasons, I'm not sure "Source" is a good idea for a top-level
menu item. Especially since I agree that we want to limit the amount of
menu items for UX reasons.

>> 
>>> We are missing "Source" category, a clear place of how to obtain 
>>> the source, as we do not have proper gitweb with list of
>>> projects, at least link to
>>> http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/admin/projects/.
>> 
>> On "Source" I don't really think it is a top-level menu item.
>> There is a much better argument for "Support" or "Get help".
> 
> People should have immediate path to access the source in open source
> project, this is what it is about.
> 
>> There is a general ergonomics rule of thumb that top-level
>> categories should not be more than 5 or 6, and not be fewer than 3
>> or 4 - even 6 is giving the user a lot of choice and a lot of
>> things to read, and if you only have 2 items, you're better off
>> avoiding a header altogether and designing your page around those 2
>> categories. So I'm happy having "Get the source code" under
>> "Develop" and under "Download".
> 
> I don't approve these ergonomics rules... If these rules makes the
> site unusable for me as a new comer, and I cannot find what I look
> for (which I do find in other similar sites), then something is wrong
> with these rules.

Personally, I don't understand intuitively all the user experience and
interface decisions that expert designers make. I recommend, though,
that we don't dismiss them outright without trying to understand and
consider the various consequences. On that front, Garrett will be back
in the new year, and I'm sure is happy to help our understanding.

Bottom line for me is, too many links on a page is not what I'm looking
for. Well organized information where I can find what I want without
having to use Search, that's what I want.

It's OK that others don't mind too many links. But others definitely
*do* mind too many links and walk away when a wall of links is presented
to them. What's the right # of links for a top-nav or for a page? That's
debatable, but there has to be some guidance and rule, or we end up
looking list this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020525101346/http://www.netscape.com/

>> We don't have a good page on getting the source code right now -
>> the process is different for Node, Engine, VDSM, etc. This might be
>> a good community project for someone.
> 
> It is master site design... not a separate project.

I think Dave simply means, that page is a wiki page, anyone can edit,
and it would be a good task for someone to improve that page.

>>> Community is not a proper word for "Mailing lists", first thing
>>> I look is for "list" in the home page and I expect it to be
>>> there, the term "Have conversations on our mailing lists" is not 
>>> something common although it may be good English.
>>> 
>>> At http://www.ovirt.org/Mailing_lists, I expect the term "Full 
>>> index of mailing list" instead of "the oVirt mailman page".
>>> 
>>> In the "the oVirt mailman page" we are missing vdsm lists.
>> 
>> 
>> On the location of the mailing lists: The Community page could 
>> perhaps be improved. There is a lot of text right now, and we can
>> definitely improve on it and make the actions available much more
>> prominent. Suggestions are welcome!
>> 
>> On the VDSM mailing lists being missing from the oVirt mailman
>> page, this is a consequence of the list being hosted on
>> fedorahosted - suggested improvements to the text are appreciated.
> 
> All source repositories and mailing list of ovirt should appear in
> ovirt.org. This includes all related projects without exception.

This is simply a mistaken link on a wiki page. It should go to the
fedorahosted.org mailing list, and I just fixed it to go there.

What is really missing is the [[VDSM]] page on the wiki. Cf.:

http://ovirt.org/Engine
http://ovirt.org/Node
http://ovirt.org/VDSM <== missing

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41

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