Suggestions for Joomla.org improvements - Part 3 & 4 - Leaders and Users

Written by Jeremy Wilken 15 May2010

This is Part 3 & 4 in unsolicited usability review for Joomla.org, and if you haven't read Part 1 - General Thoughts or Part 2 - Developers Perspective, then do so first. I'm combining the last two parts into one, to help produce a more coherent design.

A little bit of time has passed since Parts 1 & 2, but there are still two angles I haven't yet covered from the original post. I am going to cover them both here together, and provide the final design.

The first group is people who have a distinct interest in the way the Joomla project is managed and executed. They may not be coders, but they might be. They might use Joomla to make websites, or they might not. There is a significant group of people who have active interests with Joomla without using it regularly or programming for it.

The last group are general users of Joomla, who aren't heavily involved with the regular happenings of the project and are not developers. This is the largest part of visitors to the website.

Part 2 Review

This is the visual mockup I provided at the end of Part 2. I'll be building from here to refine it and provide yet another revision, which will serve as my final vision (or suggestion) for the homepage.

Part 3 - Project Community

This is probably the most difficult group, because it is a bit hard to define. The basic condition is a user that is interested in the project more than in the product. This would include the leaders of the project in various capacities, those who have a vested interest in the project (even if they don't work with the product), and any member of the greater community who follows more of the developments and the community as a whole.

This perspective generally needs this kind of information:

• Leadership blogs
• General Joomla announcements
• News and events
• Forum activity
• Involvement details

Probably the biggest difference between when I started this series and today, is the recent soft launch of people.joomla.org. A new dynamic to the community has been introduced, but I will be largely ignoring it for it is young, and has yet to establish its true identity. It very well may be a vital part of the homepage, but time will tell.

Part 4 - User Base

By far the largest group, I'm grouping together the remainder of the community into a group that uses Joomla, but do not get involved with the project directly. These are the people who make websites with Joomla or who use Joomla as an administrator. They will download and use Joomla, post in the forums occasionally (usually requesting help), use the extensions directory, and more, but the key difference is they don't involve themselves directly with the project.

This group needs the following things:

• Easy access to downloads (multilingual)
• Support
• Documentation

In general, they need quick access to the tools available, and are less interested in politics or community discussion.

Reworking Part 2

Let's start by addressing my revision (posted above) rather than continually working from the original homepage. The Project Community would likely be very happy with the left part of the page, and the bottom. It highlights the latest information, and easy access to news. General users might not have much use for the leadership blog, but otherwise should find most of the information relevant.

The right side has a lot of developer specific information, which I suggest needs to be scaled back some, and rearranged. I think that the Get Involved aspect is currently undervalued in the design, and should be moved up. Developer News should be pushed down, but retain its design. There are some nice quick links at the bottom that should be pushed up higher, such as DOCS, API, Mailing Lists.

A new section for events should be added, and I think that makes sense on the left side. I'm going to suggest between project announcements and the leadership blog. This is useful to all people, but can be especially helpful to general users who need training or very involved community members.

In general I don't see much need to do a whole lot with the homepage for general users. It has three very distinct icons at the top now to help point users to the appropriate place. However, the one thing I think Joomla fails to do with the homepage is to tell the world what Joomla actually is. This might sound silly, but try very hard to imagine you don't know what a CMS is but someone told you they want to suggest it for a website. They suggest Joomla, so this user looks it up and tries to understand from the homepage what it is. I highly doubt users will get it unless they have a technical background in basic content management concepts.

So on the right hand side, above Current Releases, I will add a little block that will be the anchor for the page. I have no idea how many, but I bet the vast majority of visitors are actually new.

The Final Rendition

This is as far as I am taking this overhaul. You'll see that the design has been simplified in some areas, and expanded in others. The focus is to provide quick access to information, clear the clutter, and keep each of the different audiences happy. This is just one variation, it could be heavily modified and still achieve a similar effect.

In conclusion

This is meant to be a basic overhaul and to provide a bit of insight into how to look at your own website. Since I consider Joomla as much mine as yours, this was not a task I took on lightly. I didn't embellish design details, and my mock up does not implement everything as perfectly as I'd imagine it, but it does point out the areas for improvement.