Designing the Home Page for Non-logged in users

I did, but we seem to have lots of good ideas floating and are lacking a structure to create a specific plan of action between yourself, @danyalamriben and me which will turn our ideas and efforts into an awesome new home page.

Should we perhaps put specific tasks we need completed (by ourselves or others) which will create our new homepage?

Diana is also looking at the wider site UX and how it all ties together. Diana I can make a wider sitewide UX list for you to begin setting out tasks there which you’re working on

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I’ll make the lists as an example, unless you have specialised frameworks you’d rather use

I just posted an overview of a plan of action on Diana’s UX thread just to get us some traction. It’s just a suggestion. Beyond that I’m happy to help with any tasks once we get sorted.

I noticed that you suggested making users sign up to view certain content. A word of caution here, and this is just my opinion.

This is always a bit dicey because gating users is difficult.

The reason is that you need to have sufficiently captured the user to where they’re invested enough to sign up. If you block content that would enable them to become invested, you’ve shot yourself in the foot. You can expect users to back out at this point if they’re not interested enough.

Some websites operate contrary to this (looking at you Pinterest) but that’s just not user friendly.

An alternative tactic is sign up via action. To use reddit as an example, you can view most content without singing up, but as soon as you try to customise or take an action you need to create an account. So, this is the philosophy of the content stands for itself. It’s engaging enough to prompt users to sign up so they can interact. reddit has also gone through growing pains to put it lightly on what the landing page looks like for potential users, but that’s a testament to content first.

Another avenue of thought is prompts. A well timed prompt stating “Be a part of happiness” for sign up might be useful.

Anyways, just spit balling here. Ultimately it’s the landing page and messaging that will count, and as far as sign ups go maybe some A/B testing would be helpful down the road so we can some solid quant.

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Alex, I will confess :hot_face: every time I’ve tried to find what you sent me (I remember the first time I was able to scan in on my way into work) I get lost in a tangle of these posts of a captive refresh on the mobile site and when I finally throw my arms up and just re log into the site I’ve totally ADHDiana’d my way to somehow responding to a different thread and forgotten my task at hand. So help me god, I will find it now! Lol. I am really sorry though I know you sent some valuable stuff my way I just have been falling in a rabbit hole on the site looking for it

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this is the model we have now, but we find the vast majority of people just explore rather than signing up and joining in. the thought was that it was better to leave some mystery and just show some awesome things we’re building on our platform and great 30sec videos to get people engaged

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@AlecAaron I created new lists in Trello to try and resolve this.

currently important tasks are posted here, then lost behind more discussion. which makes sense as this is a discussion forum, and not a project management suite. The idea is that as soon as a suggestion you want someone to act on is made, or thought of, it goes into the list. So for example it could be a new card saying ‘review this idea and come to an agreement’ and you’d tag whoever needs to act on this in the card.

here’s the link: https://trello.com/invite/b/PFj7RlgM/a12e9b4bdc6fff4a5e7439754c9a7e3b/focallocalorg

I also just re-organised the Action Center which i think makes the site structure easier to understand. sorry it took so long @danyalamriben

@danyalamriben @AlecAaron @NJUX I was thinking about the sign up page Vs sign up when performing an action on the platform.

As a lot of our offering is public activities (or resources with the homelessness map), what I see happening now when we run an activity is that users come, see when and where it is, then leave. There is no need to engage.

One of our primary design goals is to create a participatory community.

With users able to see everything without signing up, I feel the majority of our users will consume rather than engage and participate. Creating a click/browse and move on culture like other social media platforms. For us it is better to have 1000 engaged and pro-active users, than a million visitors/followers.

We want people to ‘do’ rather than applaud

What benefits can be offered for signing up?

The ability to comment?
Ability to save content?
Ability to be alerted for relevant stuff for someone?
These are just off the top of my head.

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social benefits. “everyone will see me doing X”

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OK cool! I’m getting how this works!!

2 posts were split to a new topic: User Stories

Sorry Alec I’m not going to be able to respond to this adequately today, I will tomorrow. Great work :slightly_smiling_face:

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A post was merged into an existing topic: User Stories

I just wanted to let everyone know that i’ve set up our/your card in the Action Center where you’ll find a link to this thread, your own Trello board, and a Google drive folder (which i will need to add your emails to before you begin uploading there).

action.focallocal.org

Someone asked for analytics a while back. Google analytics isn’t set up, although it’s quite easy to do. These are our analytics from Cloudflare. Almost none are making an account right now:

I dropped our current planning on the User Profile Page into a Google Doc and added it to Trello.

It’s here. I also added it to the Trello board and linked it in the top of this page.

I have my annotations in there although this is becoming fragmented, very quickly

the problem with linking to that lone document is that i cant zoom out from that doc level view and see the folder that it is nested within. I now have to pull trello up, find the right trello board, and then find the folder level view of the google doc to even know the scope of what we have going on, all tasks stemming from a comment in a discourse thread. You can see why it would hurt people’s brains, and why the temptation is to become distracted with a different task

You can from the action center by clicking on resources, and at the top post of the ‘about’ category for every team in this forum which has links to their folder on Google drive.

In the new design you suggested Trello/kanban would also be at the top of each thread, and I suggest one of the lists in it is for important links which would include the doc, and resources folder.