My analysis and conclusion about the current two drafts

Sun Oct 20 16:52:42 UTC 2002

> Well, we could remove that stuff on the left.      

This way you'd remove a quick way to see where you are currently located on
one 
site. Is this added usability? 

> We were already planning to change the colors to something with a bit more

> contrast, yes.      

I'm looking forward to it.      

>> -> No clear distinction in the menu which links are local links related  

>> to the site and which are leading to other sites of the KDE family.      

> That's a false distinction with no value.  Users have no reason to care   

> about technical matters like that.      

I guess I've to mention some important things before you keep taking about
it as      
a plain "technical matter":      
Firstly there is a legal reason to make a distintion between internal and
external      
links: If you include all links as internal links you as the webmaster will
be also      
responsible for the content of the linked site. Now KDE family websites are
not all      
located on "official" servers and maintained through CVS but quite a lot of
them a      
privately run and updated by single developers themselves. This makes it
possible      
that some KDE site run this way suddenly contain political stuff you don't
agree      
with at all. But by having linked to it with an internal link you are
basically taking      
over the other site's content as your own and thus are also liable for
wrongdoings      
there. A clear distinction avoides exactly this.      
Secondly there is the problem of consistence of designs:  If you are showing
a link     
to another site the visitor will expect the other site to be similar in the
look and     
feel, you are implying it's on the same site after all. But more often than
not this     
might not be the case at all, and by leaving away a clear distinction you
are     
adding another layer of possible frustrations for visitors. KDE related
sites are     
located on many server in many countries maintained in many different ways
and     
having many different design and structures. Completely ignoring this fact
is not     
just hiding a major technical and legal matter, it's possible to crossly
misinform     
and mislead any visitors, even you and me, in such a structure. This
shouldn't be     
necessary for the doubtful sake of "usability".     

> "Internal" Links will have their own heading, as they do on the usability 

> newdesign site.      

There is still no clear distinction which link is internal and which link is
external. I     
don't know of any rule which say that links after the first heading are
internal and 
the rest are external.     

> We can label it as search KDE.      

Still doesn't help much. For example I'm searching for a specific KDE
application,     
will your generic search feature give me search results from kde.org where
it     
might have been mentioned in an old press release or will it search
apps.kde.com     
where I can find more infos, ratings, comments and downloads for that
program?     
Now I'm searching for the same but want to get the result from kde.org, not 

apps.kde.com, how can I do that?     
There are many KDE related search engines which all serve for different
purposes.     
Giving the visitor a simple search box implies that he can search
everything, a     
feature which doesn't exist anywhere on any KDE site so far and thus is,
again,     
crossly misleading. By things like this people get frustrated, it's not a
feature 
which really helps.     

> "Left browser window border?"  And nothing gets cut off here.  You must be

experiencing a browser bug.      

Maybe I am, I'm using a very old Konqueror 3.0.3 after all, and you already
said     
that compatibility is no issue for you, right?     

>> -> The menu as well as the search box are basically invisible for      
>> visitors due to its placement on the right (which is unusual). Focus is  

>> solely on the content, which makes it possibile that the visitor won't   

>> look at the menu and try a search at all when the page's content doesn't 

>> give what he was looking for.      

> Yeah, right.  So you're just super-smart and saw it, but most users won't 

> notice?      

You are member in the usability mailing list, right? Then you surely already
read 
about the de facto fact that there are basically two types of users:
Business Users     
whose main concern is time. If they don't quickly find what they are looking
for     
they are as quickly giving up again. And the Hobby Users who have enough
time,     
are not looking for something particular, play around with any site and are
excited     
when they find something new related to something they are interested in.
For     
the latter group usability is not such a big concern. To the first group
however it's     
a very big concern, and the less time they have the less they'll be willing
and able     
to change to a new design which contradict many de facto standards in
today's     
web. And sadly this first group is exactly the group which we need to
address and     
to reach if we want to win more users for KDE. 

> Please abandon the hyperbole and distinguish between your personal tastes 

> and problems.      

Same to you.     

>> -> Even worse the menu might get completely obscured when the content    

>> needs more width than the brower window gives.      

> You must have a terribly buggy browser.  The whole notion of a float is   

> that the main body is wrapped around the side.      

Yes, today's browsers' behavior in general is very buggy indeed, but we
shouldn't 
excuse our own sloppy designs with excuses like this. 

Dude, please think about some common everyday scenarios in which you design 

would be used: Content doesn't only comprise of plain text which can easily
be     
resized to fit in specific resolutions, it can also contain fixed width
stuff like     
pictures, plugins etc. These kind of contents can easily make the content's
width     
broader than the available visible width of the used window. Your
right-menu-only     
approach suffers on this since it's the menu which gets cut off first in
this case.     
And when your approach fails, you get something worse than anything else:
not     
only is your menu no more quickly reachable, it might not even be visible to
the     
visitor anymore, and new visitors out of the above mentioned Business User  

group will hardly look around whether the site actually does have a menu as 

easter egg somewhere. This is the very reason why important menues are
usually     
always located on the left.     

>> -> The menu is far too long. Maximizing the window in a screen      
>> resolution of 640x480 already gives a blank space of three pages with    

>> given content. And the amount of wasted space is increasing in higher    

>> resolutions while the text gets broader. which does not only look bad    

>> but also makes the text in the content more unreadable overall.      

> Well, all those sites are important.      

??? How is your "answer" related to my paragraph?     

>> -> The menu being so long and not split in a "related" and a "KDE      
>> family" part makes it harder for visitors to notice similarities in menu 

>> designs even though there might actually be a consistent part at the     

>> bottom of it.      

> Again, this is a technical matter which is irrelevant to the user       
> interface.      

Aha? Now the feature of being able to recognize similar and consistent menu 

structures across multiple sites is a "technical matter"?  

I'm getting the impression  that your approach is pretty much a big building
site 
containing many questionable "features" you partly say that they "have to be

there" and partly say "it's planned to be cleaned up later". If we were to
decide 
right now what design to use Sebastian's design would win because his
design's 
look and feel is finished, yours would be disqualified since it's a plain 
embarassement to look at it at the moment. Clean up your draft until it at
least 
looks and feels better than the current kde.org design we intend to replace,
then 
you can come back and we can discuss all our points again. 

Best regards, 
Datschge 

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