u:
>> What I'd like to see (but will *not* do myself)
>> ===============================================
>>
>> Of course, considering the context provided above, all what follows
>> shall be taken with a pinch of salt, criticized, and entirely
>> revisited by people who are either experts in the design field, or
>> more easily affected than me by this kawaii thingie, or both.
>>
>> * I'd like someone who visits our website for the first time to feel
>> welcome and, perhaps more importantly: personally engaged.
>>
>> * I'd like to have enough cute-ish graphical hints on the homepage to
>> make the people who're into this kind of things more comfortable.
>>
>> Don't worry, people like me probably won't consciously notice these
>> hints, as long as we're not displaying kitten fullscreen. Oh, but
>> even if we don't notice it, it might help making us more comfortable
>> too ;)
>>
>> * I acknowledge that any implementation of the above requires to leave
>> more room for calls to emotions, personalized messages, examples...
>> and thus less room for cold, hard, general facts. (As a side note,
>> I guess that reorganizing the important info we'll drop, so that it
>> is still easily discoverable, will be a challenge, but oh well, some
>> people are just good at this kind of refactoring :)
>>
>> * All this probably calls for revamping our homepage, and perhaps even
>> (as suggested by Tchou) for creating different landing pages, aimed
>> at different audiences (e.g. first-time visitor, existing user,
>> potential contributor, you name it).
>
> Agreed, this is also what i would like to see on the long run.
>
> Rather than insist on the cute-part, I'd say that the website may need a
> little bit of non-intrusive, real, graphic design. Graphic design which
> improves readability and makes information easy enough to find, while
> being appealing to the Reptilian Brain through colours and forms that
> make people feel welcome.
I fully agree with u on this, and I like that vision much better than
the initial proposal by intrigeri. Don't take it personal :)
I'm sure there are billion ways we can improve our website. But I think
it would be a mistake to focus more on the way it "look", say at the
surface level, than in the content and its structure; and try to make it
look "cute" in an attempt to make it "better".
1. Visual
=========
Our site should convey visually the ideas behind Tails: it's easy and
it's safe, but both at the same time. If it looks too "geeky", newcomers
might think it more complicated than it is actually. If it looks to
frivolous, then it might not help users trusting it, funders taking us
seriously, or hardcore and bored geeks feeling like joining the party.
In the end this looks like, once again, finding a good compromise
between been "secure" and being "easy to use". But that time in what our
website convey visually to the inner brain of our visitors.
And to make a another analogy with strategies we are already using in
doc writing for example, in doubt I would stay neutral. I'd like us to
focus on doing our job (being easy and safe) but otherwise stay neutral.
In other words, I don't care about people going "oooh, it's sooooo
kawaii!" as long as they go "oooh, that looks easy", and "oooh, that
looks trustworthy".
Looking around the Internet it seems to me that most major websites are
going this way already. Check the websites of say, Windows 8, Mac OSX,
Android, and Ubuntu. They use graphic design to support their visual
identity and organizing their content, while staying quite neutral
visually. They use quite more photos either from users or their product,
but not many drawings for example. I didn't find much "kawaii" stuff,
except for the Android which could rank on a similar cuteness level as
our new one actually.
All that work needs a graphic designer.
2. Content
==========
Our site is full of tons of technical information. It's like a
encyclopedia in a way. People should find their way around and get their
questions answered. And I'm sure we could do tons of work on that.
Once upon a time I learned that user interfaces, like websites, can be
thought has having 5 planes: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and
surface. See
http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements_ch02.pdf.
And graphic design rather comes at the end of the process. The rest is
more information architecture or whatever you call it.
Such tool might help us if we want to rethink the website, but then we
should work from the bottom up, even if we of course already have the
top planes from the current website to deal with. That might be the
tricky part in the end: how to do small iterations while dealing with
keeping all those planes in mind.
> I like the idea, but if we want to work on this together we'd need a
> mailing list to organize this type of work (like tor-www). I would be
> interested on working on this and on providing some information on what
> should actually appear on the homepage (could work this out with Tchou
> and sajolida).
I think Frithjof (in Cc:) was also part of the www-team dynamics, maybe
he could tell us more about how this went. I think the initial dynamics
died out a big, so I wonder why and whether there are lessons to be
learned there.
> Furthermore, i can ask some graphic designers I know IRL for concrete
> proposals. There could also be a call for submitting graphical
> mock-ups/ideas like was done for the logo.
I think we need to work internally on the content and its structure
before calling for graphic design. But yes, starting with the homepage
might be a good exercise. So, as a first step, does anyone feel like
thinking about the homepage in abstract terms?
--
sajolida
