Re: Usability review of debian.org?
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> I personally think it would be interesting to see that. If the
> recommendations doesn't include stuff from the "How not to help" part of
> <http://www.debian.org/devel/website/desc> I guess they would be mostly
> appreciated by most of us (even if that would mean some additional
> work ;).
>
No problem. I believe strongly in using the simplest, lowest tech
solution that meets your user's goals, which include accessibility and
internationalization.
> Of course, I guess you know Debian and that it's not a company but a
> community of volunteers. So if you are after getting payed for it I'm
> afraid but I guess I have to disappoint you there. Volunteering the
> report is of course appreciated and would be get you a warm applause :)
I should've been more clear from the start. I'm a Debian user and I want
to help make it the best operating system it can be, so this is definitely
volunteer work. I think that the current Debian web site is great!
Compared to many corprate sites out there it is a joy to use. While I've
been using the site for my own goals I have run across some issues that
could benefit from a closer look. I'm sure if I go over the whole site
carefully I will find other ways a great site can be made even better.
I have some questions about this project:
Is someone willing to do a little digging in the site logs? Can I do it?
I would definitely want to know the statistical breakdown of which
browsers are used to view the site, the percentages of different languages
used and which pages are the most popular. Depending on how detailed we
want to get it may start to be useful to look at (anonymized) individual
sessions to track the path people take through the site, as well use
patterns of the search engine.
How does the web group work with other groups such as the documentation
team and the security team? The first thing that caught my attention was
the layout of the main documentation page. How should that be handled?
When I write the report(s) should I make sure it gets copied to their
mailing list?
Is it a problem to give you an organized list of issues rather than
individual bug reports?
Also, please note that I'm not currently planning to do organized user
testing. Instead I will be using my experience looking at sites from a
usability perspective to make suggestions, and to make reasoned arguments
to support those suggestions.
One last question is perhaps the most difficult. I expect that the
majority of things I suggest will be relatively easy to fix and primarily
affect one page. However, I may end up suggesting things that change the
menu structure or require some changes in already existing scripts. If I
can make a good enough argument is the web team willing more difficult
structural changes? Unfortunately, due to several issues I am unable to
volunteer to actually implement any changes I might recommend.
Thanks!
-Jeff
> So long,
> Alfie
Reply to: