RFC: Home page design

[Eric Siegerman]

On Tue, 2009-09-01 at 13:44 +0200, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> Design 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emmajane/3877149393/
> Design 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emmajane/3877149251/

I prefer #2, but with reservations.

#2 looks cleaner, less jumbled.  (The clutter of #1 comes from a
number of things -- the logos in the middle of the page; the
differently coloured "Release features" box; the odd-man-out
green "Download" button.)

On the other hand, I really like the detailed global nav. footer
on #1.  (I'd never really noticed those until you(?) pointed them
out at the start of this redesign effort, but since then I've
come to really appreciate them on sites that have them.)

To your specific questions:

> 1. Utility navigation (the very top strip): do you prefer Design 1 or
Design 2?

#2.  I like that it's clearly its own page element, rather than
being part of the logo banner, as #1's is, where it kind of gets
lost.

As others have said, front-page (and indeed, every-page) search
is really important.  I don't see that as a serious knock against
#1 though, as a search box could easily be added to it.  (I.e.
this seems more a simple bug in #1 than a fundamental design
shortcoming.)

Whatever the final design, though, please make sure it has a
search bar as part of the global page furniture.

> 2. Banner carousel: necessary or not needed?

I can take it or leave it.  It's kind of nice, but takes up a lot
of space.  And as someone else said, it won't be obvious that
what's being displayed are different UI's, rather than assorted
screen shots of one UI.

> 3. Entry points: 4 panes (Design 1) or 3 panes (Design 2)?

The four-column layout also adds to #1's clutter, I think;
as does the fact that the second row spans columns.

#2's three-column layout works better for me.  (I *don't* have a
problem with its varying column widths.)

> 5. Additional concerns?

One thing that bugs me about both designs is that in the main
content area (the "chewy center", as we called it at my previous
employer :-)), the buttons are flush right.  That looks weird to
me; I'd much prefer flush left.  (Oddly, flush-right looks OK to
me in the wide column, I only find it jarring in the narrow
ones.)


Put all those comments together and you get something like this:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/86666232@N00/3879874079/

Please consider that to be only a sketch, *not* anything like a
final design.  I made it from your artwork using GIMP, and my
GIMP-fu isn't up to doing a professional job of that :-/  More to
the point, I made little attempt to fine-tune the spacing, and no
attempt at all to recolour the cut'n'pasted footer from Design 1
to fit better into Design 2's colour scheme -- my severely
limited design-fu isn't remotely up to *those* challenges.

The problem I see with *my* design is that it's rather sparse.
Even though I shrunk the banner vertically, there's still more
unused horizontal space than I know what to do with.  Maybe the
picture carousel needs to come back in order to add some visual
interest, if nothing else...

> 4. Additional praise?

As others have said, both designs are better than the status quo.
And even though I've griped about both and made a mashup of them,
well, I couldn't have begun to produce either one from scratch.
So thanks!

  - Eric