website mockups, what is fedora?

[Mike McGrath]

On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> On 08/21/2009 07:52 AM, Mike McGrath wrote:
>
> > Now the 'vision' stuff.  We're kind of hoping the spins page (which will
> > include KDE, the gnome spin and others) will become a strong way for the
> > individual sigs to give a better indication on what the spin is, why one
> > should download it, include pictures, videos, whatever to better market
> > it.
> >
> I try not to be an active desktop-proponent but I do like to support
> fairness.  To make the spin page viable getting to it has to be a lot
> easier.  When confronted with this:
>
>
> +=================================+
> |                                 |
> |      DOWNLOAD FEDORA NOW!       |
> |                                 |
> +=================================+
>
> (more download options)
>
>
> There's not any incentive to visit the spins page.  If we expect the
> spins page to be a showcase of talent, then we have to drive people to
> visit the spins page to see that talent.  Otherwise the talent will
> spend its time doing more important things.
>

I'll defer that to the mo'ster.  But I think the idea is that advanced
users will somehow be compelled to click on the advanced link (hopefully
Mo's magic can make this happen)

> > If it's a complete failure (and it very well might be), lets look at why,
> > what could be done to make it better.  If there's nothing else to make it
> > better, bring it back to the board and state why and we'll re-think it.
> >
> Since I know you love doing this, what's the metric for failure?  What
> are we going to measure to determine if the spins page doesn't work?
> Fewer hits on the spins page than on the get-fedora page (since in F11,
> the KDE spin download banner was seen everytime the get-fedora page was
> hit)?  A smaller percentage of downloads for the KDE spin vs total ISO
> downloads than in F11?  Fewer new contributors to the KDE SIG after F12
> than were gained after F11?
>
> Equally, how do we measure success?  If a higher percentage of people
> download a non-default spin?
>

You've peaked my metric curiosities.  I'll come up with a couple of
metrics to measure and we'll discuss how accurate they'd be at measuring
success.  Though I'd say right now if the ratio of Gnome : KDE downloads
is similar I'd say at the very least we've not failed.  I'm not going to
mince words here, I'm pretty sure the metric we're worried about is the
gnome vs kde downloads.

The funny thing for me is, as I mentioned in a previous post, I almost
never use spins.  Especially since the spins are now LiveCD which people
cannot use to upgrade and which people cannot do package selections on.

> If there's really the expectation that we can evaluate how the spins
> page affects the adoption of non-default Fedora spins and that we'll
> make changes (even back to the old page if it's better than the current
> page) if the experiment is a failure, then there has to be an agreed
> upon way to measure that success or failure -- otherwise you're just
> deferring the arguments until later.  And making it harder for the
> people who don't like this change to be heard (since inertia will then
> be on the side of the new design).
>

I think we have to, it'd be foolish of us to say "here's how things are
going to be", then have us measure it, show that it was bad for all
parties involved and then say "nope, we're not going to change it" without
at least discussing it.

	-Mike