[OSM-talk] Welcome box on the new map page

[SomeoneElse]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> This redesign was done by employees of MapBox, and they spent a lot of 
> time on it. I'd prefer them to weigh in in this thread themselves 

Thanks Frederik.  I think that it would help if they did; it might help 
to put a human face on some of the design decisions beyond a vague and 
handwavy "fresher look".

> There was a presentation at SOTM-US and one at SOTM in Birmingham

I'm guessing that's http://jfire.io/sotm13/#0 ?

If so, that doesn't say anything at all about the usability of the end 
result, or what end-user testing was done.  There are four design goals 
at the front - it would help if someone could explain in what way the 
redesign was intended to achieve those.  The first of these 
("information architecture") seems to be the one that's been missed by 
the widest margin - it simply isn't possible to use the same cues that 
you'd use on normal websites to determine functionality.

Taking just one example, if I go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ there's 
clear and consistent feedback to the user about what every item on that 
page does.  If I instead go to 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/history , there isn't.  
It's clear that the left-hand column is some sort of list - the colour 
of each section changes from white to cream as you go up and down it.  
Beyond that, who knows? (I've just had to ask about exactly this on 
#osm).  The changeset number (despite it being part of the URL of an 
individual changeset) can't be right-clicked upon but the changeset name 
can, although you don't know this until you've moved the mouse over it - 
there's not the visual separation of links and non-links such as occurs 
on the BBC site.  The changeset close time has a dotted underline and 
the mouse pointer changes from a hand to a question mark - I still don't 
know what this is supposed to signify.

If I'm asking this how's someone with less experience of using web 
browsers (but lots of experience of their local area which we really 
want to capture) supposed to manage?

Something that has got forgotten both in some of the negative responses 
to the new web site design (and some of the negative responses to that 
criticism) is that we're all on the same side here.  No-one's going to 
disagree with goals 2 and 3 of the presentation linked above - but I'm 
concerned that we absolutely won't be "strengthening the community" if 
no-one can figure out how the OSM website works.

Cheers,

Andy

PS:  The things that are genuinely bugs I'm less worried about - they're 
getting fixed, and fast.  Something very similar to 
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/575 was a 
problem with the old web site too around 18 months ago, but this 
particular problem with the new one's been fixed within a day.