856754 - Improve the MDN home page

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
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We should implement a simple, limited update to the MDN home page, to fix its worst problems. This update should not depend on the complete site redesign.

What problems would this solve?
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* the "browse thousands of docs" box has two prominent links (Mobile Web Apps and Firefox Add-ons) that we should not be sending anyone to ever.

* there are no links to important things like marketplace, developer tools, or WebAPIs. Maybe it's just me, but I could not navigate to the developer tools landing page from the MDN homepage.

* this is subjective, but... to me the identity of the site is not very clearly or consistently presented here. It doesn't express what Mozilla is about in a unified way, it really looks like a collage of different sites. Important things (HTML, JavaScript) are lost in the detail, and important connections (e.g. between web apps and Firefox OS) are not made clear. I know fully resolving this is the target of the redesign, but think we could do better even in advance of that.

Who would use this?
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Everyone who lands at developer.mozilla.org.

What would users see?
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I've written a mockup home page (shared, I hope, here: pastelink.me/dl/a4a368).

It's based on the idea that there are three fundamental things that MDN is about:

* open web technology
* open web apps for Firefox OS
* Firefox for developers (desktop and mobile web browser)

Each of those gets a section in the page, in that order, and each is broken down into 4 sub-topics (like "HTML", "CSS", and "JS", or "Developing Web Apps" and "Firefox OS Marketplace".

Although this mockup appears to suggest that each subtopic is a little graphic box, like the current boxes, it could just be a heading like "Firefox OS Marketplace" with a short explanatory paragraph including a couple of additional links (this latter would be my preference, I think it's a cleaner look).

We'd need to write that explanatory text, and I'm happy to bikeshed that too.

Beneath all that there's the blog, which should *only* be the hacks blog, and the demos. That's it.

####

I know this page has problems:

* there's no front-page link to the Simulator - it could replace WebAPIs, perhaps?

* Developer Tools are positioned as "Firefox Developer Tools", where it would be better to position them as generic tools that can be used to debug web apps as well. But I think the tools are not quite there yet, and the documentation isn't either.

* there's no place for Persona, which is especially bad as Persona is hard to reach from any of the other topics. But Persona's hard to fit into this taxonomy.

* it's not a very flexible structure: if we decide that actually open web apps does have 5 subtopics, too bad! It doesn't fit the grid.

* ...and probably some I didn't think of

I'd be very happy for us to solve these additional problems too. But I do think this page would be a big improvement on what we have now, and I don't think it has any problems that the existing page does not share. So I'd be OK with not fixing them.


What would users do? What would happen as a result?
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It would be easier for them to find stuff and to understand what MDN is about.

Is there anything else we should know?
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I'm interested in fixing the home page's current problems, not in implementing this mockup specifically.

The mockup is only one way to try to address the current problems. I'm sure that are better approaches out there, and if we can solve the problems I've identified by using a different design, that's fine. The mockup is mostly to illustrate, I hope, that we can do much better than the current page by making some fairly simple changes.

Comment 1

[ali spivak]

Assigning to myself so I can get this into the discussion for the redesign