I’ve just been approached by a connection who is teaching a graduate course in usability and human factors. He’s looking for a project for his class to do in the spring (January–May) semester and would love to work with Fedora.
Here’s what he said
Since we’re looking at revamping the websites, this seems like perfect timing. He’s trying to get things settled by the end of this month so he can get ready for the start of the semester. Are y’all interested in this? Who should be the point of contact?
In the hindsight, it can be one of the things that we can discuss about in the Objective Leads meeting. What do you say @riecatnor, @jflory7, @ramyaparimi?
I unfortunately don’t think the timing for this is ideal for getfedora org… I’ve already started researching and redesigning the website for the past few weeks now - I’ve been conducting stakeholder interviews and began wireframing. We’ve been planning big changes for some time now (restructuring downloads to integrate spins / labs / more into the main site for examole), so testing the existing website wouldn’t really be actionable since it’s a moving target.
Is there a different website we could offer instead as the study subjectp? Perhaps Fedora Magazine which is pretty high-traffic but not being actively researched and redesigned?
Fedora Magazine can be a good starting point for usability testing and any leads that we obtain from that can help add value to the up-and-coming website refresh. ;D
A benefit of using the Magazine for usability testing is that it may also be easy to apply those learnings to the Community Blog too. Both are WordPress and use similar themes.
To be clear, are you saying we should use Magazine? Because if so, I’ll need to go talk to them first. Or are there sites that the Web & Apps team maintains we should use?
This came up as a good candidate site in the W&A Objective Co-leads meeting. I think we should check in with the Magazine team and see if this is something they would be interested in working together on.
We could choose to use one of the static sites (e.g. spins.fp.o & arm.fp.o), but I think there is still ambiguity about how the sites are updated and maintained.
Yep, we would need to reach out to the folks looking after the magazine first. The reason why I’m not wanting to touch the sites maintained in the fedora-websites repo is that, as @duffy mentioned, the redesign work is underway and so is the website refresh project management.
With limited capacity, but I will assist with this.
I’m kinda swamped right now with the Mote rewrite, Easyfix rewrite, helping with the website refresh efforts, mentoring Outreachy candidates and finding a good anime to watch.
I wonder on what level the group operates. Fedora Magazine can be a good starting point, but also it can be a bit boring: Wordpress blog is always a Wordpress blog
Doing UX testing for something like bodhi would be much more challenging but also probably more interesting.
When you mention this, it made me think what usability tests on something like Koji would look like.
What if we suggested they look at both an “engineering”-oriented website in the project, and a “mindshare”-oriented website in the project? I’m not an expert but I think it would also be interesting to any two websites from these two parts of Fedora together. We might learn something new!
Because teams.fp.o is going away in December, the magazine team has just switched to using pagure.io for tracking articles. I’ve only just started using it, but it appears that there are lots of things that could be customized for a better workflow for our use case. It would be nice if there were a configuration option to add javascript and/or css to customize a project’s web interface (e.g. rename the “new issue” button to something like “new article proposal” or add “display: none” to controls that are irrelevant to the magazine workflow).
