[webteam] Sections

[Adam Nemeth]

Oh, the usual "information hiding vs. modality" argument... been
around since Palo Alto or even before...

On 9/15/07, Robert Martinez <mail at mray.de> wrote:
> As we all agree we should adress different audiences differently
> (therefore the five sections:
> "IM-user", "developer", "server admin", "business" and a "section
> choosing").
>
> First:
>   Technically speaking - every setion is basically our same page,
>   but offers a different perspective to all our information on jabber.org.

Hmm, I think it's a wrong perspective.

I'd consider it as a hierarchy - sections meaningful for:
- Everyone ("jabber basics"): Client list, public server list, etc
- Only meaningful for developers: code libraries, XEPs, devblogs,
development mailing lists, service/mashup highlights (have you checked
out airtalkr.com recently? seems to me it has an open 5222 port... :)
- Meaningful for organization leaders, to be showed for them (by
advocates, developers, vendors) : marketing stuff, case studies,
commercial vendors, benefits, etc
- Meaningful for sysadmins: jadmin list, what bugs how, etc (I
sometimes think it's a bit similiar to developers interest and could
be mixed well).

Probably the easiest way to understand this is through ROLES: in your
life, you have a lot of roles. You're your mother's child, probably a
father (/mother) of your child, an employee at your workplace, a lover
in bed... but usually the context gives you what role you play.

In my current mental model of jabber.org is that when you want to get
to know jabber, you go to everyone/IM-users/Endusers pages, even if
you're a geek.

When you want to create something with jabber, you go to the
developer's room/corner, which would have strange words (like C as a
language... is it a short for chinese??) for a non-developer, but
still familiar for you as a geek who can program. (Btw, XEPs, SASLs
and other TLAs shouldn't run freely in the wild even there!! We need
to have a dictionary, how about that?)

If you feel comfortable with programming enough, you may want to
introduce it to your boss, or want to sell your own program for
clients, you look at the "For business" page to show it for them, or
try to collect your own arguments from it.

When you try to install a server at home, you may run into problems
(like: how do I enable using AIM through jabber?) which aren't for a
usual end-user, nor a businessman (it's enough for them to know it's
possible.)

>   The way to access information should be tailored to the adiences needs.
>
>   Letting apart  HOW we  route the audience to the corresponding section
>   I have a question:
>
>   How should you be able to change your active section?
>   Anybody just entering "jabber.org" in his browser should be able to
> learn about everything else on the page, too.

I hope a geek always knows what "information for developers" link
stands for at the top of the page - or maybe we should write it in
l33tsp33k?

And besides, I'm in doubt that anyone in the end user or manager role
would like to read about C++ and other things - nor an average user
wants to get a lot of marketing stuff.

So basically, I still think it's a hierarchy, probably with the 'links
for everyone' (alias end-users' floating always, if it does feel
better for anyone.


>   I'm not a fan of having a menu or list of links that changes slightly
> based upon "another menu".
>

That's called modality. It's considered bad in some schools. On other
schools, it's called information hiding, and it's considered the best
thing since sliced bread: way too much information confuses the
novice.

Probably most developers think of information hiding as a bad thing,
because they're clever: I mean, they CAN handle a lot of information,
since if they couldn't, they wouldn't be able to do their daily job.

But always remember: it made macs succesful - and I know a lot of guys
here (including me) who uses a mac. :)

(Probably they don't want to bother with needless information, but
it's another story)
>
> Second:
>   Obviously we have much information that should be visible for some but
> not for others.
>   We need to assign and keep track of sections and their corresponding
> pages (or links).
>
>   I tried to gather a more or less complete list of all available pages:
>   http://wiki.jabber.org/index.php/Mindmap
>
>   The goal is to assign sections to every page.
>   If we feel like this is feasible we could start tagging each nodetype with
>   audience tags and build the menus accroding to that taxonomy (or we
> could use new fields)
>

I'm still besides the good ol' hiearchy, probably with some sticky pages.
-- 
Aadaam <aadaam at gmail.com>