There’s been a lot of new questions I’ve had to ask myself when its come to thinking of a way to change the workflow for the Mozilla QA team’s web portal, QMO. Namely, am I really doing this correctly? I mean this is the first time I’ve had to do anything of the sort, especially creating mock ups and work-flow diagrams.
With that said, it’s been incredibly fun and its something I really enjoy doing, but that in no way means that I’m any good at it… and that’s scary. Not because a lot of people are going to be seeing the results of this project, but because I care about the ideals of the company and want its culture and ways of doing things to be spread throughout the rest of the world. Unfortunately, to truly believe in that means to truly want the best results to be put out there. And to have the best results come out of this project means to have the most experienced and most creative people/team working on it. From that line of logic, well, we don’t want to mess this up by out-workflowing the workflow. Making the darn thing too simple might backfire and either force the user to think that there isn’t enough stuff that goes around here or get lost after starting their experience with MozQA.
Here, take the Get Involved Section for example:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Community/QMO_Discoverability/Get_Involved
It’s meant as a simple, easy-to-understand workflow that gets the user to be a part of the MozQA Community, but will it be obvious to the user? Is there too much information on the Get Involved page? Do I need a foxkeh or two? Now, multiply this over a couple sets of audiences and this smorgasbord of UX complexity just shouts its prominence from the rooftops.
Oh well, at least I’ll know how to use it.
Awesome post (that I stumbled across completely randomly).
Is https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Community/QMO_Discoverability the home base for this project?
A few tips I’ve heard through the years,
- a great resource for all things web design, http://tinyurl.com/qp6ov8
- be able to test your changes, and recognize +/- results
- “be ready to throw one away”, it might not be right the first time
- design is hard. you care, I’m sure it will be great.
If you need anyone to bounce ideas off, I’d gladly be the bouncee.
Cheers.
Yeah, the Discoverability Wiki is the project page and really, thanks for the suggestion on the book! There’s much appreciation on this side for what you guys do with Mozilla’s webportals on a day-to-day basis. I’ll definitely ask you some questions when they come up whether its on design or even drupal.