Eclipse.org homepage: the saga continues
After years of getting ‘the Eclipse.org homepage is awful’ feedback, we decided to turn around 180 degrees and redesign our homepage to remove clutter and make it easier to identify interesting content based on who-you-are, instead of the conventional what-we-offer.
I guess the new page works for total newcomers who can now get to Eclipse and new technologies easier, but for old-timers, the new home page generates more of the same ‘the Eclipse.org homepage is awful’ feedback. You can read all the feedback in this bug, but to save you time, here are some highlights:
- The old homepage showed latest announcements, latest spotlights, latest community news and foremost latest plugins (new one and update one). This was very very informative.
- There is no content on the new home page.
- This is the first time I’ve visited your site and was curious to see if the old home page was less bad than the new one. I wasn’t getting much info from the new one.
- I suggest you seek design inspiration from google.com not pets.com.
- I appreciate that Eclipse wants our opinion.
Arned with such great feedback, Nathan challenged himself to solve all our problems. I can only give you this blurred preview, but take it as a sign of good things to come.
Posted December 10th, 2008 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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5 Responses to “Eclipse.org homepage: the saga continues”
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Wayne Beaton Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Tease!
Boris Bokowski Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I’m sorry to say this but the preview looks awful.
Karl Matthias Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I want to point out again that new users–one of the groups critically targeted by the new page–may now be finding the site amazingly better to use but are not likely/able to provide that feedback. Especially since most of them never saw the old page to begin with. We’re only seeing a small slice of the data. I’m not saying we shouldn’t make improvements, but this data is highly skewed in one direction.
Denis Roy Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Karl, look at the third bullet. One newcomer actually did go to the old home page and told us it was more useful. Also, there are many comments in the bug that don’t give a clear indication on whether the person is a newcomer or not. The barriers to submitting feedback were very low (ie, it doesn’t get any easier than sending an email to webmaster) so I disagree that the data collected is ‘highly skewed in one direction’.
Karl Matthias Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I did read that. But I have read a lot of the comments on the bug and to me at least it has been pretty clear that the vast majority of the comments are from repeat users of the site.