Hi All,
This week we are calling on feedback on the first iteration of prototyping.
To view the prototypes in their current form please go to: http://drupal.markboultondesign.com
The wireframes produced so far are very much a work in progress, with many of the ideas being suggested from research that has been conducted to date. The card sort task (which many of you participated in - thanks!) produced a vast amount of data which we have been able to use in the prototyping stages. Usually 7 or 8 responses to a card sort task is enough to get good quality data ... we had well over 200 responses!
In keeping with previous weeks, please pay a visit to Leisa's blog where you can keep up to date with the project and add your own comments and feedback. In particular we would encourage you to look at the following, which summarise the user research this prototype is based on:
a) what we learned from the community wireframing project, (http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-what-we-learned-from-the-community...)
b) more thoughts on the information architecture (http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-more-thoughts-on-the-information-a...) and
c) what we learned from the card sort task (http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-what-we-learned-from-the-card-sort/)
Please also follow the Twitter group (http://twitter.com/drupalredesign) and the Flickr group, where many of the wireframes have been posted. (http://www.flickr.com/groups/drupalredesign/)
You can either comment here, or on our own blogs. All the comments will be seen and evaluated to establish trends that will filter back into the development process. But, it's worth noting, our emphasis at this point in the project is weighted on more formal, structured feedback on task-based interviews and testing, which is going to be conducted this coming week with a representative panel of 'Outsiders' and 'Insiders'.
Thanks for sticking with us and letting us know your thoughts, every comment counts!
Comments
I dig
A couple questions and points.
Typo on the community page in a heading "in out community", I'm assuming it would be instead "in our community."
I hate, HATE, the term "IRC." I manage the LA Drupal group and there's nothing worse then trying to explain what IRC is, where you "download IRC", etc. etc. etc. Ugh. Can I please recommend that it be renamed and reconsidered as "Chat", because the average person getting started, even if they know PHP or CSS, or nothing like that, will probably never visit an "IRC" tab unless curiosity kicks in. Also, there's no plan to embed an IRC room in the chat area/page? I run http://www.drupalchat.net to lower, err, demolish the entry barrier to IRC by having a ajax widget loading IRC channels.
I'm a major fan of the new home, the new groups, the project detail page wires; the sidebar is PERFECT and joining a module project/group from that page is genius. The custom "My Drupal" page is what I have dreamed about seeing on Drupal.org. I also really like how the association is folded into the site. Really good runs.
Thank you.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
drupalchat.net
Just a quick mention that I didn't know drupalchat.net before but I love it! It might be a good idea to have it go to #drupal-support by default though instead of the developer's #drupal. People that need help with developing their module probably know how to use irc already...
But IRC has so much more
But IRC has so much more meaning than 'Chat'. We have to be wary of hiding terms that are correct just because people don't understand them. We can explain things and we can educate. I wouldn't mind the tab being called chat but absolutely positiviely do not hide the term IRC.
chat, then IRC
I think calling the tab 'chat', then explaining about IRC makes sense - in fact I don't think we could hide IRC on the page itself even if we wanted to.
A couple of really simple
A couple of really simple suggestions.
Awesome work!
--Andrew
I really like the overall
I really like the overall layout, +1 for moving the downloads link "above the fold".
The demo should definitely not lead to opensourcecms.com, which is a fairly confusing place. If there's no demo on drupal.org itself, I think the link should just be removed.
Various comments
I really like a lot of what I see here, and think a lot of it still needs work. That makes it a good first set of wireframes. :-)
Homepage:
On my 20” monitor, the Download and Getting Started blocks are still below the fold. They need to be much higher, say in the big white field in the top right. I’d almost put Getting Started first.
“Join our great community” – Too self-aggrandizing. “Join the community” has the same “group hug” punch but is less egotistical.
“Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it.” – Good marketing spin, but “insiders” know it’s not actually true. :-) Drupal without contrib is a mediocre blog.
Regarding search, there’s been some interesting discussion just in the last 2 days. Right now d.o has both a generic search box and a project/download-specific search block that was added recently (after a year of staring at it and doing nothing) that is, IMO, a huge huge win for “insiders”. “Find me a module that does X” is now 10x easier than it used to be. After the call on Tuesday I spoke with Tiffany and Addi about a 3rd search block for just handbook pages, which would turn the handbooks into a “Knowledge Base” as well. Addi noted that would be confusing with 3 search blocks, so we discussed making it a single search field with 3 radio buttons (All, Downloads, Docs). PHP.net has a similar feature. Not sure if it’s too early to be talking about that sort of detail, but I’m bringing it up just in case.
I’m still not 100% convinced about the split home page concept. If we go that route, we should definitely use the anonymous version as the “default” for new users so that they aren’t hit with a massive change in their UI right up front and can then slice and dice however they’d like. I’d also point people to Sam Boyer’s recent topical blog post. Ignore the parts about Panels :-), but his discussion of the 3-faceted user is spot-on.
Events:
I like the RSVP link right up front.
Each event will also need to have its own node/page, so how we link to that from here should be figured out.
The RSS feed of the current page is dead-simple to do. Not sure about iCal.
Association:
Knee-jerk question… What makes this news different from the news on the News page? How is this news not just a category in the main News section?
Community:
I really dig the Google Map concept, if we have a way to actually do it. ;-)
IRC:
I don’t quite get what the image of IRC would be. A screen shot of mIRC? That’s a proprietary app. XChat? Lame interface. :-) Pidgin? XChat? And wouldn’t it be 95% text anyway? May not make such a great picture.
Projects:
+1 to listing all of the maintainers directly on that page. It should probably be limited to those who are listed with access, not those who have committed in the past but currently don’t have CVS access.
“Reported installs” should probably link to a page describing what “reported” means.
There’s another directly-relevant discussion about this page that may be worth looking into, as we’re talking about changing the way the downloads are managed. There’s even screenshots! :-)
The blocks on the side listing recent issues, etc. sound good. That’s good both for browsers and for maintainers as it gives more information about the state of a module directly on one page. Related modules, if that logic works right (our job to make happen, of course), can also be a huge benefit, especially if module developers have a way to “seed” it. (Eg, always link to modules that this module depends on.)
Project group, so every project has an associated working group. Dear god yes! :-)
General:
One thing I note is that there is no consistent sidebar across the site. The selection of blocks for the right hand side seems half topical, half arbitrary. (Probably will depend on the user which way they interpret it.) Now that’s not automatically bad, but right now the right side blocks provide a strong sense of consistency across the site as well as provide for very easy navigation to selected key areas (mostly insider-relevant, granted). We should be mindful of of not having the site shift too much as you navigate around, or you’ll get lost in one section and have no way to other areas than to go back to the home page and start over.
Perhaps allowing users to bookmark pages on the site to show up in a custom block on every page of their very own? There’s even a module that does this already. :-)
Great start, Mark!
The project pages.
The project page is basically my proposal in html format (complete with all the example text I made up!). Would be nice to get some credit for that ;p
It's a good start, anyway. I'm glad to see my ideas being taken into account :)
Also, it should be noted that my design was only intended for modules. I think themes probably merit a different approach. More on that later, if I get a chance.
credit indeed
hi John
yes, you are correct, we have drawn very heavily from your proposal and the discussion that followed it, as it mapped very well to other research we had done and was obviously v popular within the community. I hope that it didn't appear that we were 'claiming' your work as our own - in this project, we don't really feel as though any of the work is really ours, but rather a faciliated solution drawn from some of our experience and research and a lot of listening to people like you!
I did think that I had specifically mentioned this on my blog but in retrospect I haven't actually done this - apologies - given the amount of work that you put in and the great work that it did in driving forward the conversation, I should have made more mention of that there and elsewhere. I really do hope that more people will be as actively involved in helping solve design problems for the community, so if there is a way that we can promote this through better recognition - it's something I need to be more aware of!
At any rate - I hope, as I do, you consider imitation the greatest form of flattery :) And thanks again for your work to date!
leisa reichelt - disambiguity.com
user experience consultant (design research and user centred design)
working with Mark Boulton Design on the drupal.org redesign project
leisa reichelt - disambiguity.com
@leisa
feedback
I've seen a lot of my own feedback and suggestions incorporated into the iterations as well. Often combined with feedback from others, or with subtle and important modifications (my.drupal.org becomes the d.o. homepage for logged in users, for example). With these prototypes changing noticeably every few days, I'd expect the final iterations to move quite a long way from where they are now, neither your mockup, nor the previous wireframes and metrics proposals produced over the past two years of redesign discussions, but a healthy combination of input from various sources, distilled into something we can jump on and implement. My reaction has been to be very, very happy that my feedback, and that of others, has been incorporated into what we see now - often with subtle but important modifications. We don't have a proposal for a monolithic site, the community is posited as an essential part of the information architecture rather than it's current position hidden behind many layers of content, discussions are being opened and re-opened and these constantly find their way back into the 'official' proposals. These iterations aren't simply a stitching together of various people's wireframes - the primary focus at this point seems to be the very high level IA - which has clearly not come from any one particular direction.
As regards http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration2/project.html specifically
I think it suffers from similar issues to the homepage mockup in terms of the download links being below the fold. If possible, it'd be nice to have the download links as an insert with the recommended stable releases (similar to the current download block on d.o homepage) - with -dev releases on a separate download page for the curious (refactoring http://drupal.org/node/108746/release into a view with a similar structure to the release table in the mockup might work for this - and would be simple enough to implement).
With the metrics, there's potentially quite a few additions to this we'd like to expose - test coverage, issue queue statistics, dependencies etc. etc. - so to me it'd make sense to move those below the download links/insert, above the reviews.
looks great!
I think 'The Drupal Project' is supposed to lead to wherever /project ends up – there’s an ongoing discussion on Leisa’s latest blog post on what that should be called, as it stands it’s confusing though. If we have a big download button somewhere prominent, then one of the suggestions (like extensions, components) would be great.
The logged-in home page is my dream come true for Drupal.org, it'd both serve the existing community really well, and be a self-documenting showcase of cool stuff you can do with Drupal.
I’m not sure that the association needs a top-level navigation item – most front-facing association stuff would end up in news or planet – which also has a prominent spot. I’d reckon that ‘association’, ‘shop’, (and maybe security) would be better off in a common footer or something – still available on every page, but they’re not daily visits for either insider or outsider users of Drupal.org.
The community.drupal.org mockup is really nice, and encapsulates much of what's going on in an easy to manage way.
I'd like to see jobs as part of a more general 'classifieds' component - so people can put offers for module/feature funding, other smaller things which aren't jobs as such up there - that way we could deprecate the current spam/troll magnet which is the paid services forum.
Overall, things look really good. I'm really encouraged that most issues people are finding are quite small things as opposed to fundamental issues in the overall architecture.
d.o in navigation
A small usability issue: when navigating from drupal.org to e.g. community.drupal.org or documentation.drupal.org it is not clear from the menu how to get back. I guess drupal.org should be added to the top level menu, on the left, and it should not be labelled "Home". (Then what should it be called?)
Would Drupal.org work for a
Would Drupal.org work for a label?
For your consideration... a few amends
hi all,
thanks for your great feedback to date.
we still have lots to work through (as you know) but we've made a few changes today that I wanted to share with you for some feedback.
you can see the updates here: http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration2
there will be plenty more changes to this iteration before we round it out, but the main ones I'd like you to ponder on are:
we've consolidated 'Community & Support' and renamed 'The Drupal Project' to 'Download & Extend'.
The rational for Download & Extend is as follows:
a) it’s a call to action to download core/modules etc.
b) ‘extend’ also hints at things other than modules like themes & translations - generally making Drupal do more, be more customised.
c) ‘extend’ avoids confusion/ambiguity re: ‘extensions’
d) ‘extend’ is also a call to action to help to extend Drupal and it’s capabilities
We've also moved Professional Services 'up' to a sub-site (not sure this is the right thing to do.... I kind of feel as though it fits better with Jobs and Events, the other 'listings' sections), and demoted Association (welcome suggestions for alternate titles, or do we need to call it Drupal Association - I agree it's comfusing), and Shop (I'm not convinced people will think they can buy Drupal here - stay tuned for testing results).
On the not-logged-in homepage we've also moved 'Get Started with Drupal' above the fold, which includes a 'Download' call to action. I think the 'Download' keyword should be highlighted more (size/colour/bold), but I'd like to encourage the idea that we don't actually try to get people to 'Download Drupal' but to 'Get Started' with Drupal - getting started being that they get to know all the support resources available to them before they start trying to download and install on their own - so we can give them a little scaffolding to what we know can be a tricky experience.
Just a few thoughts - let me know what you think. There are a bunch of other changes that need to go in as well that we're still working on, so don't think we've ignored you if you don't see your feedback in action just yet!
thanks again,
Leisa
leisa reichelt - disambiguity.com
user experience consultant (design research and user centred design)
working with Mark Boulton Design on the drupal.org redesign project
leisa reichelt - disambiguity.com
@leisa
Modules & Themes I use
On the Homepage logged in: Would we be able to get an addition of "Themes I use" to the are holding the "Modules I use"?
On Community & Support: how about renaming the IRC tab name to Chat?
I like the "Download & Extend" and agree with the points you listed. I like this change, it feels sorta like the next life of the Drupal project and the community. This site will be a huge landmark milestone for Drupal, bring a sense of establishment many aren't aware of yet; props to all involved and are commenting/helping.
... and come to think of it, I'm starting to agree with the notion that pro services should may want to share space with the jobs. I can also see how site sponsors would and should be able to separate themselves from the jobs area, even if they're hiring Drupal talent.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Very good job so far. I like
Very good job so far. I like the structure and typography. The content is a bit hard to gauge with so much still missing.
Project page
First of all, the prototype is great, and I even would rather want to use it as is in place of the current look already. (...which may be read that I would prefer a minimalistic/clean design between the lines...) Quick notes:
+1 for a smaller font size (like in the prototype; block headings could use a smaller one, too) The more fits in the visible viewport of smaller screens the better.
-1 for "hiding"/decreasing access to project issues on a project page. We updated the issue queue links on d.o project pages recently, and you might be able to remix those. The issue queues are still the most important thing on the Drupal planet, so there should be an "early access" to get involved, see what's happening, contribute, and request "something" in a project. The other gimmicks like groups, reviews, metrics, and stats are just peripheral; those do not exist at the beginning of a project, and might start to evolve when the heart of a project gets in shape (i.e. via issues).
Rock on!
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
I agree that the current
I agree that the current imageless "prototype" is quite pleasant. I imagine that the final product will be convoluted with a lot more images and "flair," but if a theme like this were optionally available to us when the site goes live, I'd use it!
The Boise Drupal Guy!
probably way too much feedback
BIG ++ to Crell's suggestion of the handbook being the "knowledge base" I think that is a very familiar industry term. And big +++ to the search-ability. I always wish i could filter out 4.x stuff and 5.x stuff so I can just see the 6.x stuff.
HOME PAGE
I really like the case-study and 'famous' Drupal implementations. I think it raises the profile of Drupal, and is what the first page should be.
I don't know what the image is supposed to be, but it would be a great place for an icon menu. Like a 2x2 grid? or a triptych? I dunno? Download- Contribute -Demo - News,
If you make an icon menu, then your "download below the fold" problem is solved.
I also really like the news on the front page. Promoted front page announcements and big news items should appear on the front page. Official v community-promoted news has a place there. Would it be possible to make this two columns? Official (from the association) v community (scraped from around the site, promoted etc)
PROJECT
I thought I was looking at a maintainer's page, I didn't know why I was being told about the ranking of the module right off the start. I'd expect this stuff to be lower on the page. Maybe a #link to below the downloads area? for the 'page views/download/reported installs' this fits in with the comments and feedback. There is no general link to the "issue queue".
Right up at the top, I'd expect to see the description, a link to a demo (some have them) and of course the screenshots as you have them.
I like the group posts of course. What about related forum posts? I suppose we can't filter untagged forum posts. freetagging of forum posts?
Makes me think there should be some way to link snippets, how tos tutorials, etc related to this module.
Are we employing a star rating system? A digg + A way to count yourself a "fan"?
JOBS
Functionality:
Location filterable, sortable
RSS feed of my preferences?
Layout:
Lineup the "post" button and the search box?
EVENTS
If I post an event in the community/local group/groups.drupal.org group does it go here? Or does this post appear on my groups.drupal.org sidebar? Or do I post them separately. Are the local events handled in a new way?
NEWS
If this is planet drupal, there needs to be some way to see the sources. There is a list of blogs/sites which are feeding the news. It should also read the name of the site on each post.
ASSOCIATION
I got this nice warm fuzzy feeling seeing the Association page within the homesite. That was unexpected. It felt like: Oh there's an association, an organisation behind this, tending this, taking care of this. Now, I know the Association exists, and I am a member, lol, but... it was nice having it IN the Drupal site.
There needs to be a much more apparent "JOIN" link at the top of this section's sidebar. and DONATE link as well. Like the 'action' buttons on the events/jobs pages, etc.
COMMUNITY & SUPPORT
Are the local group and online group tabs the groups.drupal.org 'places' now?
IRC
Someone else is going to say this, but you should probably include the #sign in front of channel names. it just occurred to me that this list should clumped not alphabetized. The channel most useful, #drupal-support is hiding wayyyy down the list. I see in the notes you'll add introductory test and a link to learn more. But would images be useful here? I mean, a screenshot even of an IRC chat window? This goes the same throughout. In association, like pictures of people at a conference talking together. In Events, images of people meeting, etc.
People love to see people. We need more faces, I think. I hope that Drupal.org implements user pictures like on the groups.drupal.org.
I think there must be some way to get in some images. An image of someone chatting on IRC? Can members maybe submit images/captions? Who knows... even pictures of people who commonly lurk on IRC. NikLP, Michelle, etc? Could be casual images of them in workshops/sprints/etc... but with captions and their IRC nick?
Project pages
It looks to me like several of the features of your wireframe for the project page depend on each project being an organic group (as mentioned http://groups.drupal.org/node/15295 and possibly other places). However, my understanding (supported by http://groups.drupal.org/node/15295#comment-52061) is that projects as Organic Groups is not something that's going to happen very soon, at least not until the D6 port of project* is finished.
To be honest, I don't really understand the timeline of the d.o redesign, but my impression I get is that people want the redesign to be done quickly enough that I'd be surprised if the code is finished to make projects organic groups. That probably doesn't need to have too much impact on the wireframes, but I just wanted to make sure the timeline is clear.
Also, when I click on "logged in" in the upper right of http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration2/project.html the display toggles between an almost blank page and the project wireframe. I would assume that for both logged in users and non-logged in users the page would be pretty similar, right.
timeline
The involvement of MBD in the redesign only really goes up to these mockups and photoshops, implementation is down to us. There's a lot of technical hurdles to get past, not only project* upgrades - i.e. unified search and login which are going to be necessary before we split into any more subdomains. To do the d.o logged in home page is also going to require a D6 version of mysite and/or user panels - neither of which is done yet either.
more on project pages
We've discussed this several times and yet I still see what I consider to be a show-stopper problem: the metrics used are easily gamed.
When the metrics can be gamed, they will be. {snark}And then we'll have really valuable information like "Taxonomy Manager" is the best module.{/snark}
Please either explain why your wireframes continue to include this or remove it. Reviews, downloads, page visits are all useless metrics and should be given a weighting in the IA relative to their merit (i.e. in small letters at the bottom of the page).
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
exactly
I think it's OK to display those metrics if they're easily available, but 1. we shouldn't rank anything by them 2. they need to be combined with hard (or impossible) to game metrics like test coverage/fails, issue queue stats, dependencies etc. 3. They need to be below the fold compared to 'organic' metrics like whether there's stable releases, recent issue posts, active project groups etc.
I completely disagree with
I completely disagree with this assertion. Just because metrics can be gamed does not remove them from usefulness. Did Amazon stop doing product ratings because of fears of gaming? What about download.com? Ratings are hugely valuable and we can be clever enough to mitigate the problems of gaming. We don't have to be 100% free of gaming in order to deliver utility.
Update: Catch states that we will not allow sorting on ratings which I don't really agree with but do agree that it should not be the default. Catc's strategy here is to reduce the benefit of gaming which is one important component of risk mitigation.
I actually have another idea for dealing with gaming but I need some time to write it up.
and the plan is
So, the solution is...
Edit: Sorry for being so flippant - I can be more constructive, promise.
I think it's kind of interesting that you bring up the example of Amazon. Looking at a random product page there are several different metrics shown:
5.1. Basic information about the book like the number of pages, images, weight, etc.
5.2. The same "8 customer reviews" widget
5.3. Sales rank across all books
5.4. Sales rank within 3 categories
I've left out mention of things that seem more like sales chrome and fluff than decision aids (e.g. the all the buttons for purchasing, price information)
So, Amazon is a pretty good example of my point - that reviews are handy but are only a relatively small part of a broader set of metrics. It's also interesting that the majority of the Amazon data is based on sales numbers - i.e. something that is expensive to game.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I don't know if it's a solution...
But if we are to have module rankings, why not just display the number of people who have voted on it. For example, if you know that a module with an overall rating of 4.5 has gotten 200 votes, then you know it's probably pretty good, whereas one that has gotten 3 votes and has a 5.0 rating may or may not be good. Most big ecommerce sites (Amazon, Newegg, etc.) do this, and it's incredibly helpful.
As far as I can tell, drupalmodules.com does not show how many people have voted on a particular module, so it's difficult to determine whether a module is highly rated because a lot of people use and like it, or because the module's author and a couple of his or her best friends have given it high ratings, which I think is the concern here.
Lots of ecommerce sites also provide a view that tells you how many people gave each rating, which is also very useful in determining whether something that gets middling ratings are getting them because people either "love it or hate it", or because it's just mediocre.
Vote count
"As far as I can tell, drupalmodules.com does not show how many people have voted on a particular module"
If you're wondering how many people voted for a module on DrupalModules.com, it's shown on the project page, under "vote count".
Thanks!
I totally missed it, but I see you're right. So in your list of "Highest Rated" modules, you're not adjusting for vote count at all unless there's a tie?
Noise
The top rated list is a bit noisy, and not really as useful as I'd like. The most favorited list does a better job of highlighting the real quality modules. I'm looking at ways to improve the rating system, but it's difficult when there's only a few hundred reviews to pull numbers from.
Another way to rate modules
At the Drupal Association dinner at DrupalCon Boston, a few of us had some good laughs spinning out ideas for a "module marketplace" kind of rating system, where users get a set amount of "currency" to "invest" in modules they liked, in a kind of stock market (like Blog$hares). Virtues:
1 - You have a limited amount to invest so gaming is limited.
2 - Ratings go up and down, so if a module is getting crappy its "stock" goes down.
3 - Option of earning more currency through genuine contributions.
4 - If you're good and back "winners" you earn dividends, so you end up growing your influence. Conversely, if you're no good and back "losers" you lose capital and thus influence (so trolls and spammers end up undermining their own efforts).
The conversation was all a great laugh, but underneath it I feel there is the kernel of an idea that could possibly work.
What do you think? Too crazy? Too "capitalist"?
Laura
pingVision, LLC (we're hiring)
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
Sounds good and fun BUT with
Sounds good and fun BUT with point 3 you have to watch out for lazy contributions.
Trolls and spammers are capable of earning some extra currency by just replying to reply.
There has to be some verification on the contributions i think.
karma again
This is getting quite far from the wireframes, and in a sense leads back to Leisa's post here: http://www.disambiguity.com/social-literacy/
If we start giving people 'vote money', and let them earn 'vote money' somehow, then we're getting into a karma system for Drupal.org - while that would help with gaming the stats, it would simply move the gaming down a level to karma (which IMO matters less) - however adding a karma system is an additional level of complexity. edit: - however, just having a fixed amount for everyone, then worrying about karma later, that might be a good compromise.
This sounds similar to
This sounds similar to Bugzilla, where users get a set number of votes to vote on unresolved bugs or feature requests. It helps the developers to have a good idea of what their users priorities are.
It also automatically added bug voters to a CC list for issue emails, so they could track progress without having to comment. Such a system would be pretty awesome for Drupal.org.
--Andrew
Issue voting code exists, awaiting deployment on d.o...
hunmonk and I already wrote this code. We're just awaiting thumbs up to deploy it on d.o (there are some concerns about the D5 version of VotingAPI being able to scale to the magnitude of a site like d.o). See here:
http://drupal.org/node/42232#comment-967905
Ha. Great idea!
How can it fail? It so elegantly takes advantage of those universal, and oh-so-human motivators (greed, fear, and envy). :-)
I think the key to working
I think the key to working successfully with this type of content is having a community team manage the resource and empower them with published policy, good monitoring approaches, and solid support when they follow through on abuse. As you might imagine, techniques used to game the system tend to be about as well-considered as some of the stupid criminal stories.
At some point, it might be helpful to talk with the J! team who oversees JED. They have seen it all and do a stellar job managing the resource for the Joomla! community.
Overall, these types of ratings are very helpful to new community members. When there are thousands and thousands of modules to choose from, it is simply overwhelming to know where to begin. These type of metrics can provide one, of many tools, people can use as they begin learning.
As usual, you guys are doing remarkable work. Keep innovating and having fun!
~~ Amy Stephen ~~
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org
~~ Amy Stephen ~~
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org
ditto
I'd like to echo Amy's comment. Although the Joomla ratings can be gamed, in most cases the gamers are quickly overwhelmed by the much higher ratio of legitimate user ratings. I've found the Joomla ratings almost always accurate enough for my purposes. Total accuracy is not needed. It's usually enough to be able to compare trends.
A few thoughts from using that site:
But how reliable are those
But how reliable are those module rankings?
It could be that the module was very good in the beginning, but
because of over-featuring new versions, the module could be less rated now.
If you apply module ratings, use only the ratings of last month for example.
So glad someone brought this point up
If we are to rank modules it absolutely must be done on a per-version basis, not globally. Modules vary in quality between versions and/or drupal release versions (such as the Akismet module, which for D5 was good, but for D6 is dead in the water and completely non-functional).
When rankings are entered the user should also be forced to select the version of the module they are voting for to avoid unintentionally voting for the version that is currently selected. These per-version rankings can be used to calculate a global ranking for the module if desired. If they were averaged out based on the number of users voting for each version it would provide a much clearer picture of the module overall.
Last, but not least, will it be possible to apply rankings to dev releases as well as final releases?
module ratings
so at all the idea of some module rating is good and a must have but as many people said with simple votings, download counts usage counts the risk of gaming is present and not just a tale we heard of a time before. even the ratings, votes and opinions on amazon are gamed as long as a product is new and small, you won't avoid it.
conclusion is to develop a mix up of different values where influencing the score is as difficult as possible.
i know this has all been said before but i had the need to give another opinion to this. ;)
Remember: I compute you!
Remember: I compute you!
Better than downloads counter?
Count of unique sites sending update_status queries during the past X days?
That's already included in the design
We've been working towards this goal for over a year. It's already included in the design draft currently under the heading "Reported installs". See Project node UI redesign for some of the original discussion around this and other related points. See also Project Quality Metrics on Drupal.org (meta document) for a comprehensive discussion about metrics, ratings, etc.
Two suggestions
I like a lot about prototype 2, but I have two suggestions/wishes:
More room for news on the front page
There recently was a long discussion about guidelines for promoting stories to the front page. If there's too little room, important news get pushed off the page too soon, and few people see them. Or we can counter that by having strict guidelines to ensure that only very important news get there. That means old-ish news, stale looking front page, and besides, strict guidelines are a PITA to enforce.
Keep "Support" and "Community" far, far apart
Take a look at the description of the "General discussion" forum on http://drupal.org/forum. Then go to the forum, and count the number of support questions.
A lot of people looking for support tend to post all over the place, and cheerfully ignore any hints that this might not, in fact, be the best place to ask for help. Misplaced support requests are bad for those who are asking, because they're less likely to get answered and harder to find for others who have the same problem, and they are annoying for those who want to use the forums/groups/meeting places for their intended purpose.
If we place support and community under the same tab, we make it easier to post support questions in the wrong places. I suggest giving "Support" (or maybe "Get support"?) its own menu item, and functionality that's suited to just that: Asking for help and giving answers. There are lots of good ideas in Forum topics with open, resolved and unsolved statuses?. I'm not sure if the ideal solution is to use forum (with some issue-like functionality) or issues (with some forum-like functionality), or some third way that's a bit of both.
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Hilde Austlid, Drupalchick
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Hilde Austlid, Drupalchick
The Drupal homepage does not
The Drupal homepage does not reflect Drupal's BIG Community!! Can we do something to showcase that? I like the groups pages, showing the latest members! I guess we can not do that here, a counter of the no of registered members and an explicit Join Us link would be great!
The Project page looks lovely!
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions