Some UI suggestions in the FAS site

[aruntheguy at gmail.com]

Hello Fedora Infra Team members,

I just wanted to explore Fedora and visited the site. The motivation was
enough to encourage me to pitch in and contribute whatever I can. So I went
to register myself and that turned out to be both a discouraging as well as
a encouraging experience.

The captcha system was very bad and I had to spent about 45 mins before
ricky (IRC Nick) did it for me. I found some major lapses in this particular
thing. I was informed by ricky that things would be better in the next
update, but let me give some suggestions that might help you in building the
next system a better system.

First regarding the captcha that did my day:

   1. There wasn't ant documentation about the type of the captcha, whether
   it is a case sensitive or a case insensitive one. It could have been put
   straight away in the page or as a tool tip.
   2. There wasn't a way to reload or get a alternate captcha image if one
   couldn't make out whats in there.
   3. The captcha image itself was flawed. Generally its wise to put
   distortions in one color and the text in other color or at least different
   shade of the same color.
   4. Finally there wasn't a audio captcha for people who get confused with
   distorted images. I accept this one as a luxury, but the previous three were
   very important.

The user interface of the FAS site itself isn't that well built. To be
exact, there could be more AJAXification of things. One doesn't need to
reload the entire page for everything. A few suggestions here:

   1. Almost all the buttons in all the pages are completely left aligned,
   which puts them farther left than the forms that contain the input fields
   themselves, its a good UX design if it could be put just under the fields,
   that is at the center of the page.
   2. And the size of the buttons are completely dependent on the text it
   contains, again maintaining a common size for all buttons, except for really
   long text ones is a good practice, gives a good feel.
   3. In the My account page, the first thing is Account Name, I think it is
   User Name. There might be some technical reason for the change there, but I
   feel it is a good thing to maintain a single naming convention throughout
   the site.
   4. When browsing through the group list, the entire page is refreshed, it
   could be made to load dynamically through AJAX.
   5. In a overall feel, the site seemed to be very rigid in UI, there could
   be some fluidity.

I didn't go through the entire site, I might come up more suggestions as a
browse through the pages, most of the above are very trivial things. I think
this feed back would be helpful for the team to improve things.

Thank you for the work done, and wish you for continual work.

-- 
Regards
P.Arunmozhi
Twitter: @tecoholic
Website: http://arunmozhi.in
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