Too professional?

One piece of feedback we heard from several of you about the last mockup for the front page of fedoraproject.org looked a little too professional. “This looks like it’s trying to sell me something,” one of my colleagues told me about it recently, “this doesn’t primarily say community or freedom to me at all first glance.”

Well, crap. Freedom & friends are two main values of Fedora. If folks don’t get a feeling about community and freedom from looking at our website, we’ve got issues. How did this happen?

Well, when designing the first mockup and even when iterating through the header designs, I was reviewing many application websites for general formatting & conventions for some inspiration and to make sure that our website didn’t violate any conventions that would confuse users. If our website follows patterns users have experience with at other software-related websites that involve downloads, then they’ll probably be able to have a smoother experience since they’ll have to expend less active brain power on figuring out what the website is for and what they are meant to be doing with it. It was through this quick & unscientific survey that I figured out wording for the navbar items – I chose words I saw that were the most frequently used – “Download,” “Help,” etc.

I think this influence probably ended up giving a bit too commercial of a flavor to the resulting mockup. Whoopsie!

How to fix it?

Well, let’s take a quick peek at the “too commercial” mockup:

“How to fix this, how to fix this?” I stewed. First I tried to figure out, what might have given it the commercial flavor? I asked a couple of the folks who felt it was commercial, and they just couldn’t put their finger on it. So I poured over it and figured out a few things:

• While there are people on the page, the product itself stands out much more loudly than anything else.
• The color palette is mostly grey, and the main background color is white. Very conservative.
• There isn’t a single header on the page referring to community – the words “community,” “forum,” “people” are just not in the large and prominent headers on the page.

“All right, this is fixable,” I thought to myself, looking at the list of mistakes. Not many people featured prominently on the page? Add some. The color palette is conservative and grey? Make it more colorful! No prominent community-centric keywords? Add them! Not too hard, right? So here’s what we did:

• The main navbar is now a bright Fedora blue, buh-bye grey!
• The screenshot is backed by a colorful illustration rather than a plain dark grey gradient.
• One of the first things I see on the page is the photo of Tatica and Pedrito – the darkness of their clothing contrasts with the much lighter & brighter colors around them, I think making them stand out right away.
• The headers for the page are backed by a pale blue, and the media quotes under the banner are backed by a pale yellow. More color!
• “Community” has been added to the navbar and falls towards the center of the screen, much more prominent than the word was in the previous mockup.

The reveal

So this is the course-correction to attempt to mistakes of the previous mockup, hopefully making for a mockup that better reflects Fedora’s values of freedom & community. The initial feedback we’ve gotten on it has been positive; what do you think, does it work?

But wait, there’s more!

Once Sijis, Jef, and I finally settled on this mockup being something we could live with, Jef and I went ahead and started fleshing out more of the screens needed. Jef took on the “Community” page (which will be roughly equivalent to today’s join.fedoraproject.org). I fleshed out the features page and also filled our recently-updated download pages into the new template. Let’s take a look!

Features Mockup

For each of the five major feature areas (Collaboration, Entertainment & Media, Creativity, Office/Productivity, and Desktop Basics,) I wanted to highlight a major feature of the desktop or a killer app in that category. You know, there are cool features in Fedora that a lot of long-time Fedora users aren’t even aware of. Let’s let them shine, right?

This mockup fleshes a couple of the six sections out. One piece of feedback I’ve gotten so far is that the text is just too long, “too long, didn’t read.” So it’ll definitely need to be tightened up a bit more.

One thing I think would be really sexy is to add a “download now!” button for folks already running Fedora. The kickass new Fedora PackageDB web application has this feature, so maybe it’s possible! Anyway, the mockup:

Download Pages Mockup

This mockup really isn’t anything remarkable; it’s just the recently-updated http://get.fedoraproject.org design in the new template. The mockup below is for the first page. There’s also other download mockups and they show the detailed options view and the download splash in the new template as well.

Community Page Mockup

Jef did a kick-ass job on this mockup, and he worked very closely with Sijis and me as he iterated on the design, posting revisions in IRC and discussing them with us real-time, then making changes based on our discussion and posting another iteration (so on and so forth.) He also picked the right color for it – magenta is the Fedora “friends” color. The green on the features page will probably have to be changed to “features orange” and the orange on the downloads page to “First green.” One cool component to this design is the idea of a watermark-style Flickr group/tag gallery behind the much larger, masked photo of Fedora community members. Jef also integrated the Fedora microblog feed, and made our current join graphics look a whole lot nicer!

Other mentionable items

fedoraproject.org redesign in staging

Sijis set up a staging environment for the redesign at http://stg.fedoraproject.org. Right now it has the base template with HTML & CSS Sijis and I worked on, but none of the new design meat I’ve showcased above… we’re working on it! (If you’re interested in helping… pop into #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.net and let’s talk!) So watch our staging environment; as we check in content it’ll appear within an hour or so of checkin.

Download splash system

Another cool development Sijis made was a functioning download splash system! This was a feature we had to drop in the http://get.fedoraproject.org redesign for Fedora 13 because there wasn’t enough time to implement. Sijis figured out a way to do it with Javascript, making it a much lighter and impactful feature – way to go! While there’s still some issues to be worked out as I understand from IRC today, you can try it out now by clicking on a download link at http://get.fedoraproject.org.

Embedded fonts!

We’ve got free and open souce fonts Comfortaa and Cantarell embedded in the page, so you’ll note all the mockups use Cantarell as the base font – and the feedback we’ve gotten on the use of Cantarell thus far, by the way, has been overwhelmingly positive.

And yet even more…

But it will have to wait for another blog post. We’ve got some really amazing updates on the fedoracommunity.org project, including some super-slick jQuery-based javascript from new Fedora design team member Marc Stewart!

Where the action is at

If you want to jump in on this project or just learn more about it:

• Our project page on the wiki is a great place to start.
• Pull up a virtual chair in #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.org and poke me (mizmo), Sijis (sijis), or Jef (Schendje) and chat us up!

We received some really great feedback from you on this project, including a really nice suggestion from Felix Kaechele to organize the areas of the world according to Fedora ambassador regions rather than continent groupings. This actually provided a bonus – you’ll see the design has been slightly changed so there is now an area above the individual country/region site listings to provide information & links on ambassador region-wide resources, something that wouldn’t have made as much logical sense outside of the scheme Felix suggested.

Some other feedback we’ve gotten thus far was Remy Decausemaker and Tommy He’s suggestion to make the map highlight to the region currently-being viewed and perhaps serve as rollover navigation. If you are a javascript pro and want to try your hand at this, please let me know and I’d be happy to get you started (otherwise I’ll put this awesome idea on the backburner while I devote a lot more time to the www.fedoraproject.org redesign project. If I have time I will try to figure it out since it seems like it would be a fun project!)

Anyway, based on your feedback we’ve made some changes to the design, and I put together Sijis’ template design with the HTML content I generated for each region so we now have a set of static HTML/CSS mockups:

• Fedoracommunity.org APAC mockup
• Fedoracommunity.org EMEA mockup
• Fedoracommunity.org LATAM mockup
• Fedoracommunity.org NA mockup

Let me know what you think of our progress so far, and please do let me know if we are missing any regional sites or if there are any typos/mistakes in these pages. You can drop your feedback off in the comments section on this blog, or hop on the thread on Fedora’s websites list.

The problem we were trying to solve here was having two competing navigation bars, and placing the navbar in such a manner that I felt it wouldn’t necessitate an awkward non-front page layout. In #6 and #7 you can see the two navbars have been collapsed into one, and it’s above the main banner / slideshow area. Sijis suggested moving it above the banner and I think it works really well. The problem with it on the bottom is that if you have a subpage that doesn’t have a banner, it makes the nav bar move up and down the page making it much more complicated to move between pages via that navbar (when the navbar itself jumps around the page you have to refind your place on the page to click on a nav item.)

Anyway, I hope these are at least nice eye candy, if not a more interesting study of how to solve a design problem through iteration.

#1

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

As you can see, a lot of thought has been put into the home page and articles features on it (sections 1-5). I haven’t had much opportunity to flesh out the Get Help and Join Fedora sections yet, although I know Diana Harrelson’s anthropological study of the Fedora community is chock-full of useful data and recommendations, especially for the Join Fedora section. If you have any ideas or suggestions for either Join Fedora or Get Help please let me know, since we’re still in the process of fleshing out those sections.

Now, before I type out those img tags for the mockups themselves, a few caveats:

• These are very rough mockups. I’ve been working out the navigation scheme with Sijis – I’m not happy with it right now so he’s been helping me figure out a better way – so it will probably change. So yeah, we know it kind of sucks, we’re working on it.
• The position of individual elements on the screens will probably change. The one item I do not want to move is the download button in the right sidebar, though. I want it to be approximately in that area, although it may move up to be inside of the banner. This is because especially around a release, many users visit the website in order to download Fedora so the download button needs to be prominent.
• The main banner is meant to be a slideshow. I’ll show some examples of alternative slides for it below. The idea was that the first slide would introduce users to Fedora, and subsequent slides will show you particular new features or highlights of the latest Fedora release. We’ll also have a slide in there to promote our community.

Mockups

(You can click on any of the mockups for a larger version)

Front Page

Alternate slideshow banners

Features

This page is so very rough – and these features are by no means exhaustive or even the right ones, just filler for now.

The Content

Jef van Schendel put together a content review of the current fedoraproject.org website and identified areas for improvement and called out essential elements we need to keep in place on the site. It’s a great read. Let’s dive a bit into the articles mentioned in his review and in the mockups above:

Tutorials

Ian MacGregor put together an initial list of tutorials for the tutorial section of the website. What do you think of them? Would you change any of them, or add additional ones? Do you know of any tutorials that already exist for Fedora that would be useful that could be formatted for the site?

Here’s Ian’s list:

• Build beautiful color palettes for your home and wardrobe (Agave)
• Automatically upload your files to a backup drive every week (crontab)
• Access your favorite apps with one click (custom desktop launchers)
• Decorate your desktop with family photos (Gimp tutorial)
• Get organized and build a personal database (Gnote)
• Turn your friends into the Hulk! (Cheese)

Your Life on Fedora

This article category still needs fleshing out. I’d like to see 5 article topics for it. ‘Your Life on Fedora’ is meant to show real-life use cases of Fedora users in a variety of situations – maybe an interview of a student with a sidebar highlighting her favorite apps, for example. My hope is that someone new to Fedora would come away from this set of articles with a better understanding of how Fedora might fit into their life.

What Makes Fedora Different?

What makes Fedora different is another article cateogory that needs more fleshing out. It is targeted at both users of other distros and other operating systems to point out what makes Fedora different from what they use now and to set their expectations. Why would you pick Fedora over another Linux distro, for example? Folks should have an answer to that question after reading this section.

The Project

So all of the work for this project is being organized on the Website redesign wiki page on the Fedora wiki. The http://www.fpo mockups are on the following page:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign/Mockups/Www.fpo

There’s a lot of ways you can help, so let me run through them in case you are interested :

• Writing Articles – Do any of the tutorial ideas above appeal to you? Do you have even better tutorial ideas? Want to write a tutorial that will appear on fedoraproject.org?
• Brainstorming Article Ideas – Do you have ideas for articles in the ‘Your Life on Fedora’ or ‘What Makes Fedora Different?’ categories? Do you have a story about Fedora you’d like to share? Would you be willing to interview a friend or family member who uses Fedora?
• Mockup feedback – Do you see any crackrock in the mockups I’ve posted here? (Of course you do!) Call it out! Let me know where we’ve goofed in the mockups, and your suggestions will be warmly welcomed!
• Ideas for Join Fedora and Get Help – Do you help field questions on Fedora on the users list, forum, or IRC help channel? Have some great ideas for how the ‘Get Help’ pages on fedoraproject.org could be organized? Have you helped on-board various new Fedora contributors and have some experience you’d like to share for the Join Fedora section?
• Content for the Features Page – Does the crappiness of the filler content in the Features mockup above give you severe indigestion? Do you have a clear idea of how we should be broadcasting Fedora’s features and have the time and will to write it up?

Anyhow, our work on the website in preparation for Fedora 14 continues; I just wanted to check in with you all and show you the latest. Please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments area on this blog post, or on the websites list, or in the websites channel at #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.net. We need your help to make Fedora’s website great; thanks for all of the feedback and suggestions you’ve given so far – it’s what’s gotten us here!

On Post-Mortems

“Post-mortem!” you exclaim, “how ghoulish!” Well, yeah. The term is usually used for meetings and discussions about how well a software release went after it’s out the door, at least on som of the teams I’ve worked on (greets to my tacos!) So, anyway, here is a post-mortem examination of the new http://get.fedoraproject.org design.

A little background on the Fedora website design

So I’ve already given you the story behind why we decided to re-do the get.fedoraproject.org pages on fedoraproject.org. The get.fedoraproject.org redesign work was completed as part of Phase 2 and was released with Fedora 13 this past May. If you’re curious as to the why and how we got here, you can read up on it on another blog post.

Run-down of the redesign

The design is documented on the get.fpo design wiki page and was also shared several months before release on this blog.

As mentioned in the history of this project, we decided to split get.fedoraproject.org out into two main sections:

• The first section, presented by default, would be aimed at fulfilling the Board’s requirements – a single simple download button prominently placed, a promo for spins.fedoraproject.org, and clear links to support & help.
• The second section would be accessible by links on the default page, and would provide an ala carte experience for more particular Fedora downloaders.

First Section

The first section consisted of two pages, the main default download page and an exit splash page.

Main Default Download Page

This is simply the default download page. It has a single prominent download button, listing basic requirements and instructions as to what to do with the download and links to many resources on getting help in the right-hand column. It’s meant to be simple and straight-to-the-point.

Exit Splash page

This was intended to be an exit-splash page that appeared after you clicked on the download link, but due to various technical and time constraints, this part of the design has not yet been implemented. Note it also includes pandas – very important to a good design. The bottom is meant to be a space where a rotating set of tutorials would appear – e.g., “now that you’ve found Fedora, what are you gonna do…. with iiiiittt?” (shouts to HeavyD and the Boyz!)

Second Section

The second section consisted of a page with four tabs, one each for desktop options, architecture options, media format, and activities (which basically is a full-page promo for spins.fpo.)

Desktop Tab

This tab lets you select from different desktop options.

Architectures Tab

This tab lets you select from different architecture options and provides a promo area for the secondary arches.

Formats Tab

This tab lets you select which formats you’d like to download (DVD vs. LiveMedia).

Activities Tab

This tab is basically a promo for spins.fpo.

Where the drama comes in

So I alluded to some torrential controversy in the last websites blog post. The day we released Fedora 13 and consequently the new get.fedoraproject.org, on IRC, identi.ca, and the mailing list there was a flooding of comments about how users could not find the bittorrent links. Some other complaints included not being able to find the download verification and less prominent LiveUSB instructions.

Identi.ca and IRC feedback

Here’s some of the identi.ca and IRC feedback we got so you can get an idea of the kinds of reactions we were getting:

• “@mairin nice work, thank you! BTW, will the LiveUSB tool and guide (wiki page) have a place on the right sidebar? it should be helpful. “
• “@mairin: Hard to find the ‘normal’ dvd download? Too many options?”
• “The !Fedora download page gets more confusing with each release. Is there any way to install Fedora with no optical disk drive? Maybe a floppy? I don’t want to switch hardware around just to upgrade!”
• “@mairin It says I need a CD or DVD… are there no LiveUSB instructions on the new download page?”
• “@mairin There seems to be no mention torrents anywhere on that page?”
• “stickster: I don’t know how designed the “get-fedora” pages, but kudos to them. It’s a GREAT new design and organization.”
• “Hey, so we’ve been getting some comments that people can’t find torrents on fp.o”
• “@mairin The more I look at it the less it confuses me. But I wish there was an obvious way to look through directories on download mirrors.”
• “is it intendet that there are no torrent links on the new download pages?”
• “@mairin I wasn’t really looking for them, but I noticed the 6 CDs and netinst didn’t seem to be mentioned in the download page.”
• “Its understandable since “gnome” is default but I was a little confused which version was which and kept looking for ‘gnome-live’”
• “I hunted for fully 4 mins before I found either 64 or 32 bits. I’m not used to having 43 different options (most of which meant nothing to me btw, from the names)”
• “Re the < 1 CD version….. isn't that just a pain updating to all the crap that we load on our machines?"
• “I need the checksum to verify it. the gpg stuff I can do without, but a nice easy checksum would help.”
• “Is it just me or does the new website make it extremely difficult to find F13 torrents? I don’t have a problem downloading directly from a server, but I figure we should probably make the links more prominent to reduce server+mirror load”
• “I don’t think we can avoid the fact that people not in the target audience are going to sent to get-fedora. Giving them an exit is one link. one link that could be worded so a beginner would never click it.”
• “”Installation Quick Start Guide” is only for live media, so maybe we should make it clearer – Since it’s linked from a page with DVDs too”
• “Do we really need an architecture tab? We already link to both 32 and 64 bit on every page other than get-fedora”

Mailing list feedback

Image credit: Scared Man by laobc on Open Clip Art.

The thread subject line – Regarding Get Fedora page” from the Fedora users mailing list – still makes my stomach drop and my soul feel a little meaty in a kind of traumatic post-harangue hangover: It’s not a pretty thread. It ran from May through June. Now that the dust has settled though, there are some nuggets of valuable feedback that can be extracted from the stink cloud of misery:

• “I can’t find a mention of torrents anywhere. What happened to the big master list of all image download links?”
• “I could not figure out where to grab the torrents from, or how to download the checksum files, or how to grab individual CD ISOs, or….I was lost for 5 minutes before I even figured out how to download the x86_64 DVD image!”
• “The main things, Download and more info, were there.”
• “I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone would remove all the information about torrents, jigdo, mirror lists, etc. from the “here’s all the ways to get fedora” page.”
• “I followed the work for most of the many months and I think that the pages are clear, well laid out, and easy to follow. I have spent more time reading this thread than it took me to hunt for and find the information that you are being accused of hiding. “
• “When you read ‘download options’, you think, ‘methods of downloading.’ The way ‘download options’ was originally intended, however, was to
  mean, ‘different variations of Fedora’ – options like Desktop, Architecture, etc. Options for FEDORA, not how you were DOWNLOADING it.”
• “I’m unlikely to be following many developer-oriented lists, in any case. Like I said, I’m just a user.”
• “I also spent a couple of minutes going back and forth trying to find a link to the torrents (… sure, I could have Googled right away — which I ended up doing after visiting the “Formats” page for the 3rd time )”
• “when I didn’t find the link to the torrents right away, my first reaction was to CTRL+F for “torrent”.”
• “I found the emphasis on all the different “spins”, frankly, confusing. There are two different alternative desktops (neither of which I am familiar with) whose descriptions are nearly indistinguishable. Which trim efficient resource-sparing one do I want to try first? Impossible to tell. If you
  drill for more information there’s nothing there, and you end up back where you started. I did try one desktop and was unimpressed (but, then, it’s running from a CD!)”
• “In the past, Red Hat/Fedora offered Gnome up front and left it to more experienced users to discover KDE, etc. (and made them easy to install, if desired, and even switch among them). They supplied main download sites, mirrors and, eventually torrent files and tried to encourage
  people to use the latter, with the second preference being a nearby mirror. I think these were wise policies that should be continued.”
• “Another “curious” thing I find about the Get Fedora page is the existence of the “Activities” tab. That tab is the only place where I could find the word “activities” or “activity”. Everything under that area uses the terminology “Spin”. Is there a difference between an “Activity” and a “Spin”? If so, what is the difference? If not, why not just have a “Spin” tab? Seems to me it would be more consistent.”

Making sense of the feedback

So during the deluge of feedback we received, Ricky Zhou and I had a conversation in #fedora-websites to try to figure out what we should do. We reviewed the feedback, clustering it into a few concerns:

1. Where are torrents?
2. Where are the mirrors?
3. Where is the checksum?
4. Where are: 6 CD format, netinstall, jigdo?

We took some immediate action in response to the most dire complaints we received. First was the lack of live USB instructions, which we added to the ‘What Do I Do?’ step-by-step instructions in the right-most column. Second was the lack of a link to the torrents. To address that, we did a link switcheroo to add torrents without making the page more crowded – we had a link that linked to archive.fedoraproject.org in the lower right corner of the screen, so we swapped that link for the torrents & other download methods links.

Then we came up with a plan for further longer-term improvements. These haven’t been made yet:

• The new advanced users link in the lower right should lead to an updated/cleaned-up version of http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all.
• The architecture tab of the alacarte get.fpo pages should be removed since downloads by arch are mentioned on every other tab. Instead, secondary arches could be advertised on the updated http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all.

Applying the feedback received to future design work generally

As was pointed out in the Fedora users list thread o’ doom, many Fedora users are not developers and do not follow what they consider ‘development’ lists, including the logistics, websites, and design team mailing lists. Furthermore, many insisted that they do not read Fedora Weekly News or Planet Fedora. So there is a population of users from whom we are not getting feedback from because we’re not posting our mockups and plans as widely as we should.

Well, the concern has been heard loud and clear. First off, you may have noticed the Fedora Design team for F14 is pushing out our calls for feedback wider than ever before – we have a feedback-gathering plan that includes identi.ca, twitter, facebook, fedoraforum.org, and the Fedora users list, as well as the comments pages on any external news sites that have written about our artwork so far.

Secondly, you’ll notice we’ve built community feedback periods into the F14 web schedule, and these blog posts are part of that. We are a little bit behind schedule right now but I’m hoping we’ll catch up. This blog post will be shared with the Fedora users list and other non-contributor-centric Fedora areas.

Summary, and on avoiding missing the point

The main point of this work was to make the download experience for new Fedora users simple and streamlined, so the main tension here is doing so, without destroying the experience for existing users who have much more demanding needs. I felt throughout the project we had a spectrum from “simple page” to “matrix of links” and I felt a lot of times we were being forcefully pulled towards the “matrix of links” end of the spectrum. Every single link on its own seems so innocent, “just one more link!” but the problem is, many people had their own pet “just one more link!” requests, and if we fulfilled them all on the default page, we’d have the very swamp-o’-links state we were consciously trying to avoid. While the struggle is very real, I don’t think it is very obvious to casual observers which I think is why some of the feedback got so heated.

I hope this background and play-by-play of the get.fedoraproject.org redesign project, with details on the how it was received and updated, has been a interesting read for you. We’d love to hear your feedback on how you felt this all went, and your suggestions for further improvement of get.fedoraproject.org.

A little background on Fedora website design

A long time ago, but not so long ago, http://fedoraproject.org was a simple splash page with just a bunch of links. Later on, it redirected straight to the wiki. After a release or two bringing the entire wiki down (and halting contributors from getting work done!) because of high-demand on the website for downloading releases, a very simple, lightweight set of static pages was put together to help alleviate the problem. It is the base of that lightweight static page set that we have been using for quite some time these days.

After the initial launch of Fedora Community and its freshened-up template with the release of Fedora 11, the Fedora Project homepage appeared in severe need of some lovin’, and the Fedora Project Board at the time decided to approach me as a representative of the Fedora Design Team and Ricky Zhou as a representative of the Websites Team in order to request a new design. We met with the Board at their 30 July 2009 meeting, after which the Board followed up with formal requirements for both get.fedoraproject.org and a newspins.fedoraproject.org site. Paul Frields and I ended up having a brief brainstorming session on how to make the overall Fedora Project web presence a bit more contemporary and nice-looking that August, and I floated the idea by you all here on this blog:

A phased approach

Out of all the brainstorms and discussions that happened around this time period, we came up with a phased approach we are still roughly following today (with some expansion):

Allow me to give you a phase-by-phase summary of how it’s gone so far.

Phase I: spins.fedoraproject.org

Since the Board’s requirements necessitated a single download link, it was made a requirement that http://spins.fedoraproject.org was designed, created, and complete before http://get.fedoraproject.org was changed, to address concerns posed by Fedora spins owners. The site was meant to alleviate the effects on spins’ download numbers, and also to maintain and even improve the ease with which spins’ users could find information and downloads for the spins. The new Fedora spins portal was completed in November 2009 and launched with the release of Fedora 12.

The mockups, graphic sources, and other planning documents for the spins.fedoraproject.org / phase 1 of the website redesign project are available on the Fedora Project wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign_2009/Mockups/Spins.fpo. We worked very carefully with the spins owners at the time to develop graphics and content for the spins, and even coordinated an awesome effort from the Fedora Design team in producing over 100 graphics for many of the games in our Games spin.

How well did this design work? So far, we’ve updated it once to account for the new crop of spins released with Fedora 13 (including the new Design Suite, wee!!), and I really haven’t heard any negative feedback about it besides folks simply not knowing about it. So we probably need to continue advertising it and socializing it, maybe even ramping those efforts up a bit more.

Phase II: get.fedoraproject.org

After the release of Fedora 12, we got to work on planning a revamp of the oft-complained-about http://get.fedoraproject.org page, the main page used in order to download Fedora every release. The main goal of the redesign according to the Board was, “To more effectively promote a single instance of Fedora that satisfies the computing needs of the average person.” It also needed to “Provide a clear route to the new Spins hub” and “Provide clearer instructions and links to support options.” The page should be designed for:

Primary Users

• People who are somewhat computer savvy, but may be new to Fedora and/or Linux and FOSS in general
• People who are not sure what they need to do in order to try Fedora
• People who may not understand how to create and use Live media

Secondary Users

• People who don’t know where to find anything other than the default offering (i.e., is there something else available?)

Page is not designed for

• People who are currently and comfortably using Fedora
• People who have pre-specified needs for the Fedora they download
• People who know where to find non-default offerings, and want to pick from an a la carte-style or other expanded sort of list

Now, if you know the Fedora users I do, the main tension here should have jumped off your screen and nipped you in the nose by now – we have folks who are particular about the desktop they run, the arches they need to run it on, the format in which they’d like it (live media vs. DVD vs. initrd vs. net boot vs. preupgrade vs. pxe vs. ad nauseum ), and the download method (http, ftp, bittorrent, postal mail paid, postal mail free media, etc. etc.). This is a very complex matrix, and directly conflicts with having a simple one-click download.

In order to figure out how to make this all happen and succeed, we had our work ahead of us. First, I did a little bit of research on how folks currently in the community download Fedora, running a survey on our planet. Note the survey doesn’t include any new users.

• Initial Survey
• Survey Results Report
• Survey Results Discussion

We learned three very important things via the survey:

1. Amongst readers of this blog, the vast majority of users download Fedora when a new release comes out. The time between releases can be considered a much lower-traffic time period for downloads.
2. By far, the most popular method of obtaining Fedora amongst blog readers is via the website, 46+15= 61% of users downloading directly from the website. The second and third most popular methods are bit torrent and pre upgrade, 19% and 18% respectively.
3. The DVD and Live Media are by far the most popular formats to download Fedora in amongst readers of this blog.

Based on these results, it seemed to be that the Fedora website is the primary place folks seek to download Fedora, and the more familar/technical users do have a wide range of requirements as to which Fedora they’d like to download and how they’d like to download it. Their needs won’t be met by a single download button. So we decided to split get.fedoraproject.org out into two main sections:

• The first section would be presented by default, and would be aimed at fulfilling the Board’s requirements.
• The second section would be accessible by links on the default page, and would provide an ala carte experience for more particular Fedora downloaders.

Site maps, mockups, graphics, sources, and discussion can all be found at the wiki project page for the http://get.fedoraproject.org redesign project.

This redesign launched with Fedora 13′s release this past May. How well did it work? Well. There were some (ahem) torrential discussions following its launch, which I’ll detail in a follow-up blog post I’ll call the get.fpo postmortem.

Phase III: http://www.fedoraproject.org and fedoracommunity.org

So for Fedora 14′s release we’ve gotten even more ambitious, and we’re planning a new http://www.fedoraproject.org design and a new site, http://fedoracommunity.org. Here on this blog I’ve already filled you in on the fedoracommunity.org site background and current design work(thank you for all the comments and feedback so far!) I’m still working on the http://www.fedoraproject.org design with Sijis Aviles and the Fedora Design team – we had a big discussion on it at this week’s design team meeting. Pop into #fedora-websites or #fedora-design on freenode if you’d like to pitch in and get involved as we continue to work on it.

I’ll be doing a separate post on the new in-progress http://www.fedoraproject.org design very soon, so please look out for it! In the meantime, please feel welcome to read through the Fedora Design team discussion of the current mockups, browse through some of the raw mockups and their sources, review our list of prioritized user tasks for the site, and pop into #fedora-websites or #fedora-design to continue the discussion.

So there you have it

In summary, we’ve been following a 3-phase approach to the http://fedoraproject.org design process, and we’re currently working towards the third phase with our eye on F14′s release for the next launch.

The vision for fedoracommunity.org

Fedora has a lot of local community websites. A somewhat recent addition to the mix is Fedora’s local community domain program, whereby a local Fedora community can obtain a *.fedoracommunity.org domain to point to their self-hosted website.

In the midst of a thread on the advisory-board mailing list, it became clear that it would be a good thing to have a single place where folks seeking out their particular local Fedora community could go to find it, rather than searching in multiple places for their community. In the thread, a Fedora Infrastructure ticket to this end was also referenced.

The work so far

Matt Domsch created the barebones portal page for this directory that is up on fedoracommunity.org now, asking for assistance in making it a nicer-looking site. I posted an initial mockup for feedback in reply, and since then have iterated a few times based on the feedback I’ve gotten. I’ve been working with Sijis Aviles, who very quickly took my early mockups and produced a first cut at an HTML/CSS version of them.

A few design decisions have been made throughout this process that you might want to be aware of:

• Both national flags and national borders can, in a few cases, be quite controversial and stir up hard feelings so we did our best to avoid them in the design.
• The countries have been split up by continent because there are quite a lot to list on one page, and the continent to which a country belongs nor the shape of the continents of the world are not so controversial.
• We’re considering using screenshots of each local site to help users distinguish between different communities that share the same country. Having the screenshots displayed on the screen all at once makes it a little cluttered, so Sijis and I have discussed using something like on-hover popup snapshots instead.
• This design uses the new Comfortaa font that the Fedora Design team is trialing usage of for a new Fedora titling font.

How you can help

• Are you a member of a local Fedora community? Can you take a look at this mockup and let us know if we missed your community site?
• Are you a designer? Got any great ideas for the style and design of this site? Crack open the latest SVG source, which uses the fonts Comfortaa and Droid Sans, and try out your ideas!
• How well do you think Comfortaa works in this design?
• Got any feedback on the site concept and design? Let us know. You can provide feedback through the blog comment system here, but even better, let us know on the Fedora website team list. I’m especially interested to hear feedback from Fedora Ambassadors.