These two visuals of the home page try to solve the problem of catering to two slightly different audience states: those who are new to the whole concept of transition and those who are already a member of an initiative.
Main home page
The first home page displays a large image carousel area, showing 4 – 5 slides that explain the basics of transition as well as promoting the currently most important couple of stories about recent events in the initiative.
New user’s home page
My dashboard
The dashboard is similar to the idea designed by Mark Boulton for the new Drupal.org site – once a user is familiar with the concept of transition and has joined the initiative, they can set the homepage of the site to be a dashboard page which gathers together all the information that’s relevant to their own groups, events and projects. The tabs would also provide further access to other media they’ve added, stories they’ve written, links they’ve posted and other activity on the site.
My dashboard
Feedback needed
Please feel free to comment on any aspects of the visual design, information architecture and other usability or Drupal development issues if you can spot any technical problems. For instance, I read recently that it’s actually quite hard to write a “Read more” link into the header of a Block header.
HI Chris — nice work
Like the dashboard and the way things are organized. Regarding the homepage, my immediate reaction is that it’s quite busy and though I love pink, it’s quite dominant, so for ex RSVP stands out more than the event or other info and so on, perhaps that’s the intention, but somehow my eyes found it all a bit hard to take in after a while. There s of course a lot of info to get across but the different messages/parts sort of compete with each other for the readers attention and it’s a little hard to know in which order to read the page. Is there a way you could perhaps guide the reader through a bit and calm it down a little? Like the way the social media icons are very clearly placed. Was wondering, for a newcomer, would it be worth having a ‘slogan’ that opens up the Transition K&K, so one doesn’t have to click through to another page to learn what it’s about, so ‘building a thriving community — for us” (terrible but can’t think of anything).. anyhow, that ‘s my VERY quick response, have to run.. overall — nice.
Thanks so much for responding to this Mari. You’re a star! I think you’re absolutely right about the enthusiastic use of pink on the site for all the functions and tools. It was a rather over-exuberant attempt to win over one of my Transition colleagues who’d expressed a liking for pinkness. On reflection it does dazzle and not help in drawing the user to the particular highlight areas. I also like the idea of guiding the user more.
The social media icons are absolutely essential in my mind to spread the idea ASAP – I’m using a lot of what I learned from 15andCounting to hopefully send the message viral in our community.
As for the slogan, yes, I’d probably put that as one of the main screens in the image rotator top-left on the home page. The slideshow in there will probably end up featuring 3 – 5 screens explaining more about the issues but rather than a news story perhaps we could write it cleverly to explain what we’re building each time… I hope you don’t mind if I use that idea! It’s still a first draft so we can change any of it.
XXX