Drumbeat/Batucada/Future/UX

Hi, I'm Ross and I've been hired to ensure that current and future Batucada releases work for the most important people who use them - the users!

I've been looking through the current drumbeat.org site as an example and looking at current pages and user interactions - if you've got anything to add I would be very happy to hear.

New or logged out users first impressions

• Where do I go? What do I do?
  • Sign-up/sign-in looks a bit hidden and out of the way
  • In page links to sign-up, learn more feel separate to the initial descriptor text
  • I like the drum but it feels like it's using up valuable screen-space
  • The feed - at this point feels rather useless - there should be more featured projects instead to give people an understanding of what the project as a whole is all about
• Learn more section
  • Possibility to make this a bit more editorial with any potential 'success' stories?
  • 'mozilla hat' thinks that join and events should be plugged here more

Sign-up process

• OpenID should be at the top - unless I am misunderstanding the user journey...
• Found is rather easy/frustrating to enter in bad passwords - should provide better feedback
• On a similar note the feedback on username availability is easy to miss too
• Found it very difficult uploading a nice profile picture - image cropper should be provided to make a square picture in uploaded aspect ratio is wrong as no-one wants to looks squished up

Projects

• Should be filterable/searchable to easier facilitate browsing
  • Filtering would require some form of tagging/categorisation on creation/administration of the projects themselves.
• Not sure if this is against the point but might contribution be encouraged by creating some kind of 'league table' of projects?
• Possible to display what kind of skills/idea are required to progress the project - of course this will need to be administered.
• Was quite easy to reach a dead-end (for instance the 'more details page')
• Project lead should be better highlighted but equally all contributors should be listed (are we able to tie into github for this) Are we able to differentiate between contributors (actual code) and watchers?
• Page layout feels rather weird - again there is a reliance on the feed - which needs a bit more work
  • Might the feed work better split in 2? One technical feed and one new related feed?
  • Is there any value in displaying full twitter streams? Seems an easy way to introduce a lot of un-wanted noise to the feeds. Might it be nicer to introduce a #tag for people to use in their tweets?
• The 'follow project' button should always be available for both signed-in and signed-out users - can always bring into the login-in or sign-up user journey.
• ICONS - everyone likes icons and it might better highlight the 'fun links' - github, twitter a bit better (currently they feel a bit lost)
• 'mozilla hat' thinks that join should be plugged here more

Administration

• Project completion percentage would be good (like in linkedIn) - it seems very easy to create a project without really that much useful information.
• Understanding of where the one sentence and 2 paragraph descriptions would be used would be useful. As many would word/character counts as I see that they are occasionally truncated on listing pages.