Discussing meeting times, who else to invite, and any pre-meeting discussion and preparation for our UX/UI meeting to look at the entire website and discuss how to make it more appealing and useful for the user.
i’ll be out of the country from weds 22nd till weds 1st. i can join in remotely, or we can wait until i get back 
question: do we want more people with relevant skills to join in? or do extra voices increase the risk of over-complicating the meeting?
I can possibly do a couple of hours on Saturday lunch/early afternoon.
I would suggest no designers or technical friends at this time - unless they are happy to help on the content, as we won’t be doing anything on the site. First of all, we need to map out relevant content and the best place for it to sit.
This is the hardest and longest phase, once you have the map the rest is easy.
Any official UX guys would be of most value at this stage - ones that have mapping templates and techniques as we could do with that efficiency.
Otherwise we’ll have to go around in circles a few times, part of the process.
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i can do Saturday. Do you think Kirsty, you and me are an optimal team? no skills missing that i can hunt for in our community?
Hey guys!
Massive apologies for the late reply!
I agree with Rula about keeping it simple and only inviting those specifically skilled in user experience. Too many cooks and all that…
Like Rula said Andy, someone with experience of mapping out a website, who may have templates, pre-existing maps or useful questions would be very valuable and are perhaps a missing part of the current puzzle.
I can do Saturday mid-afternoon. I am at a community gardening project near Convent Garden until 1.30-2ish, so could head over east from there and be with you by 3pm at the latest? I have dinner plans, so could only do 2 or 3 hours.
Hope that’s alright gang !
Excited to get this moving!
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i can be there. i’ll take the lead from you guys as to whether 2/3 hours is enough time as you have a better idea what you’ll be doing.
the aim will be build the framework and user flow, while fitting the tools we’ve already built into the site. they can all be redesigned, to improve UX/UI, while maintaining the functionality we’ve been building towards.
i.e. community news, action center (with trello and forum), map, shop.
Museum of Happiness on Saturday??
Hey folks,
Is this 100% happening? Any UX guys coming along? Yes, understand you wish to keep certain functionality Andy, all doable within a remit of making sure people understand how to use said functionality (otherwise, there is no purpose to it!)
I’m up for MoH, yes…always
They’ll be busy with last weekend of ballpit?
I’m now free a little earlier if that’s helpful? Can do from 1pm? Or 2pm?
Hey guys I can do 2pm for a couple of hours too. This is probably not a one off job, so it may not be complete tomorrow. Andy, this is a hard job.
Kirsty made great comments about making this about the user, so there’ll be a few discussion about maybe letting some things go
See yous tmr x
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Sweet! 2pm at MoH?
2pm works for me, see you there <3
i thought we were happy with Rula as our UX/UI genius
I’m not at all UX - that is someone’s full time job and it’s very technical. That’s why I asked you to shout out to any. We will take at least 3 times longer to map this out.
Kirsty and I know well what doesn’t work and why, but making it work is a different beast all together.
We can talk all about this later x
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^ agreed with Rula! Anyways, we’ll crack on with some good work and go from there!
I maybe 15mins late guys, train times are not on my side ! 
Rula, m’love, Andy and I are downstairs in Canvas
we didnt really achieve a firm decision on the map buttons. there are three reasons users will be clicking on it. to create a positive action, to attend a positive action, to search users in their city who have listed themselves as interested in an action and send a ‘positive action request’ (functionality about 3 months away)
can we continue discussion on the button here?
ok, after A LOT of problems with an unexpected bug in the code. here’s the temporary new home page: http://gather.focallocal.org/
what do you think?
if everyone approves i’ll move it over to the main focallocal.org url, switch ‘home’ for ‘more’ and add a drop down for ‘community values’ etc
Here’s a basic draft of the Homepage we discussed (click on it to see full screen). Albert has offered to join our team and help build it, hopefully he’ll be along soon, and @Julita has offered to create a welcoming, energetic, fun and exciting collage from our photos in Google Drive
important points from the meeting:
-
the main menu needs to remain the same (the Mega Menu), or have slight changes that can be copied to the other areas of the website.
the menu on the home page and map is identical across the whole website. We use Discourse, Wordpress, Meteor, plain html, and Shopify, and the menu is used to make the user feel that they are on the same website all the time -
the website is a very ambitious community hub, and the biggest challenge is fluidly guiding new users through the many areas they can participate in. the homepage needs to begin that path, so we identified the two main paths we want users to take, and want to feature them prominently, then have the secondary paths lower down the page
the basic design we have so far isn’t fully developed and is open to improvement
Updates:
We were able to revert to two main paths on the home page by setting a pop up on the map with the three options available to users. The Megamenu is currently being improved slightly soon
suggested descriptive changes to primary buttons:
1] Build Change
2] Meet for Action
@Rula thoughts?
@albert_kai Welcome
i’ve just invited YDaniel as well, who has just about finished redoing the Megamenu code, which you’ll need to drop into the new designs