[IAEP] [DESIGN] Ideas and questions on SL.o

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 07:33, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
> Recently, I attended a presentation along with Walter, Bernie, and Dogi in
> which students from Babson College discussed the deployability challenges
> faced by Sugar and SugarLabs in the United States.
>
> One of the things mentioned was the distributed nature of our project. We
> have a extensive wiki, a variety of high-traffic mailing lists, and doezens
> of blogs. For a teacher or administrator looking into the viability of
> Sugar, it can be quite a daunting task to process and synthesize all these
> disparate sources into a cohesive message.
>
> They specifically mentioned the front page of our community,
> www.SugarLabs.org, as an example of our failure to communicate. While the
> design is visually appealing and graphically stunning, it suffers from being
> *too* simplistic in my opinion. In terms of conveying actionable
> information, it performs poorly. Most people come to an organization's front
> page with specific goals in mind, and it should be our goal to make it as
> easy as possible for people to accomplish those goals.
>
> As Bernie commented during the meeting, "one of the first things as
> developers we jump for is the link to the wiki". But this link dumps the
> user to a large, disorganized mass of content in which one can easily get
> lost. Wiki-gardening is definately a full-time job, probably for more than
> one person, but as it is, what we have isn't working.
>
> Therefore, my proposal is simple: redesign www.SugarLabs.org. As a strawman,
> lets say we were to offer, on the main page, jumping off points to the rest
> of our community.
>
> This would include things like:
>
> Download Sugar (Sends them off to the [[Try Sugar]] wikipage)
> Explore teaching resources (needs authoring)
> Solve a problem ([[Sugar help]])
> Get involved
>
> Of course, we'd need to have these all link to supporting pages, either on
> the wiki or elsewhere, but deciding how to organize something is a large
> part of actually producing usable content.
>
> We can also find a place to put the current SL.o explanation text, but I
> don't think it should be the sole, central focus of the page.
>
> Comments, criticism, and alternative proposals welcome.

What about making a list of the audience profiles and evaluate how
well each of them can find what they want? Teachers, school
administrators, hackers, parents, journalists, etc?

Regards,

Tomeu

-- 
«Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning