Re: [xwiki-devs] [UX][Brainstorming] Simplifying the Homepage

Hi Caty, Thanks for starting this interesting thread! :) See below I’m ambivalent on this one. I can see pros and cons of both approaches and I’m not sure which one is best so I think we just need to experiment. I have a stupid question: do we have data to show that users are having a problem with the home page? We have mouseflow recording on playground.xwiki.org. Could you share some analysis of them that would demonstrate the problems? My analysis: Dashboard-style page: A) + Nicer first look B) - Less easy to understand that it can be modified C) - Less information about what the user can do on his freshly installed wiki Note that to address B) I had developed this HomePage Application that I put as an external extension so that people could try it out: http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Home+Page+Application I’ve never received much feedback on it so I don’t know if it was a good idea or not. My goal, if I had received lots of positive feedback, would have been to propose to integrate it by default in XWiki. To address C) we’ve already discussed about having a Tour in XWiki (it’s even already in the roadmap for XWiki 8.2). Note that the Tour could also explain that the home page can be modified as part of its last step for example, and how to do that. Wiki-style page: A) + Can contain more explanations about what the user can do in his wiki B) + Simpler to understand that the page can edited. C- - Less polished/finished L&F I’m fine to test wiki-style as an experiment if we think it would help BUT we need to define a way to measure how it helps so that we can draw a conclusion. Because for all I know we could make the home page worse by doing so too :) Any idea how to measure that? Note: This is not just about the home page since the appbar is visible for all pages. I’m fine but I strongly believe we need to add an Application Index when we do so or it’ll just be a pain to navigate to installed apps. I’m not convinced that we should bundle videos in the distribution. We could have them on youtube and stream them but that won’t work in environment with no internet connectivity. I think I’d prefer to just have links to videos that would be available on xwiki.org in a getting started page. Generally speaking don’t you think a simple link to a getting started page is enough (as we have now), and we’d just need to improve that getting started page? Yes, I also believe that each app that allows creating content should offer a template. +1 to remove it from the home page. Note that we don’t need a wiki page to remove it. If people don’t find it useful on the home page then I don’t think they’ll find it more useful to have it on the dashboard page. So +1 to remove it altogether since I myself, have never used this feature. Would be interesting to know from our users here, if anyone has ever used this feature! Please step forward if you have! :) The breadcrumb is certainly not enough without more clue that it exists. The Tour could help. The advantage of the breacrumb is that it frees up spaces for having other panels. In general my opinion is that it depends what you want your wiki to be. If your wiki is a knowledge base then I’m sure you prefer having it on the left panel instead of the apps list. So I’d do 2 flavors by default in XWiki: * Workgroup Collaboration flavor with Apps panel on the left * Knowledge Base flavor with Navigation panel on the left ok. Let’s get this started. We need to act ASAP on this so please reply quickly if you have comments/ideas. Thanks -Vincent