Re: Feedback on Agora Octave design

[Carnë Draug]

On 17 August 2012 22:34, Wendy Liu <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been working on a mockup for the redesign of Agora Octave as part of
> ESA's summer of code. You can see a preview here:
>
> http://dellsystem.me/posts/agora-octave-update-2/
>
> Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Here's my comments:

  * there's no "log in" button on the top bar. Yes, it's at the bottom
of the mock page but that will be only the main page (I think) and we
will need to give users a link to log in when they are in other pages
of Agora. My guess would be to have a "Log in/Register" button which
turns into a "Profile" button after logging in. As a icon I'd say
something like a shade of a bust.

  * I'd remove the "Sign up" button at the bottom for the following
reason: it looks like creating an account is necessary to navigate the
site. That's the first thing it comes to my mind when I see such
thing. And since there's no reason to limit users that way, the second
thing I think is that someone will try to sell me something. If I saw
that on a site, I would immediately start mistrusting it. Makes it too
corporational, which lacks the nice feeling of having a community with
people sharing things out of interest. Most likely I'd just go away
thinking it was something proprietary. But that's just me. Still do
not need it. Most people will use the site to take code, rather than
giving so they will not need an account. That means that such a button
is not very important and the one on the top bar would be enough.

  * the top bar is too tall. I use my netbook a lot which has a really
small screen so together with the bar of the browser, it already takes
up half of my vertical space. My opinion would be to drop the bottom
bar (the blue one with the sombrero logo). Another reason to drop it
is that it doesn't add anything to the site and it kind of breaks the
space between the top bar and the page too much. Like having a short
wall on the middle of a road. I'd say the space between the top bar
and the page should be more like climbing down a step and staying on
that other level (maybe making the background of the top bar a bit
darker to stand out the difference from the rest of the page).

  * similar to the above point, maybe reduce the space between the
logos and the actual top of the page? Looks like there's a lot of
unused space there.

  * more on the same point, the icons and the font on the top are too
large. I'd say maybe half the size should still be enough. And the
space between the icons and text is too large.

  * rather than "Upload a bundle", can it be "Upload your code" and
have it link to upload both a single or a bundle? At the moment
there's no place to upload a single

  * I think I like the new Agora logo. Definitely much prefer the
square as black. The previous one was the same used for binaries
without icons (default style of Gnome I believe) which many times,
means an .exe for windows and meant frustration was close.

We need better names for single and bundle before they stick. They
were never meant to. It was supposed to be during OctConf only. Any
suggestions?

Carnë

P.S.: rereading my e-mail, I sound too mean and bossy. My apologies,
these are just my views and I know that on aesthetics, there's many
different opinions. Don't read it as in "do it this way".