[Design-team] Still need help on the Games Spin Screenshots :)

[Máirín Duffy]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 22:35 +0000, James Mulroy wrote:
> I did a few very rough mock ups of an idea i had for this, my idea
> would be to create a ajax browser for the screen shots. Due to the
> number of individual pictures it would benefit greatly from the ajax
> model.

OH MY GOODNESS - MOCKUPS!!! Holy moly, this rocks, thank you for putting
these together :)
> 
> Here you can see a general idea, I have the svg laid on top of a
> screen shot of the spins site, be warned I am an awful speller :)  
> http://fedora.splictionary.com/browser.png

So looking at this, it seems there's four ways to navigate the games. My
gut tells me that may be too many controls - but let's think about how
people might be hitting up this site. Here's what I came up with
thinking about this a bit:

1) 'I like games! What games are in Fedora? I want to take a look and
get a feel for them' - I think this may be the majority case, because if
they were seeking Game X they'd search for the upstream site. So we want
to enable rapid browsing without a particular goal game in mind.

2) 'Does Fedora have Game X?' I think this may be a less common one but
still possible.

3) 'Wow, 127 games. I want to get the few best games and not waste my
time on games that are no good.'

Can you think of any other scenarios?

With these in mind I'm thinking:

- Top 10 is very important for #3 so it's a *great* idea for our users.
It's good for us as Fedorans too because we wanna show off the
best-of-the-best, so it's a win-win.

- Categorical organization is a wonderful idea for #1 because they can
get a feel for the type of games by reading the category names and dive
deeper only into the ones that best interest them. For these folks too,
maybe some spotlight content on particular games would be good.
Categories also chunk the very long list of games into smaller, more
manageable chunks so it's overall a great solution.

- Case #2 is probably most easily enabled by search. Browsing a
directory when you know what you're looking for can be annoying.

So I think if we focus on thinking about how users are going to be going
through this site, and those methods above that might best enable them,
a couple of things become more clear:

- The alphabetized navigation is less important, because search is
easier to use if you know the game you want, and if you don't, category
is more fun to look through. If we drop those tabs we lose 5 tabs making
the UI much simpler (thus easier to grok!)

- Rather than have the sort by drop down, maybe just have tabs at the
top, similar to how we have on the front of spins.fedoraproject.org - by
popularity, by alphabetical. Maybe. Or maybe just list them by
popularity and provide a search box for people who know what they are
looking for?

What do you think?

> A rough idea of how the full bio of the game would be displayed, other
> additions would be linking to developer sites and such.
> http://fedora.splictionary.com/game_bio.png

This is a great start, the basic layout of large screenshot with details
in a column on the side is good. It's a great idea to add the size of
the game so folks know how complicated it is. The programming language -
probably not as important, the gamers just want the games to work and
most probably don't need to know what language it's coded in. I love the
idea of having a rating system and reviews. Date added is probably not
as important to have - but maybe instead we should have nice
descriptions of the games. 

> 
> And for category browsing, I think it would be a great place for the
> agreed persona to show its gamer side.
> http://fedora.splictionary.com/category.png

I love the idea of bringing in the idea of personas here!!! Maybe we can
come up with some characters (María's character come to mind :) ) to
reflect the personalities behind each of the categories. I went through
the list of games and came up with this set of categories, what do you
think?

- Adventure/Role-Playing
- Board & Card Games
- First-Person Shooter
- Learning
- Platform
- Puzzle
- Racing & Simulation
- Strategy
> 
> These are very rough cut examples and some of the features (such as
> star ratings and such) may or may not be beneficial to the games spin
> site.

These are a great start James! I'm so excited to see UI mockups here on
list :) :) :) 

~m