Re: Header design mock 11/10

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 08:52 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> Commenting on the latest design here:
> http://mihmo.livejournal.com/33555.html
> 
> I think it looks fantastic. Big improvement on the
> previous version (and I liked that one anyway).
> (http://mihmo.livejournal.com/33530.html)
> 
> It looks much more open and brighter.
> The separation of the general navbar and the local
> header works very well.
> So does the more prominent GNOME logo.

Good stuff.  As someone who hasn't really been following the design
process, my immediate reaction is:

- Looks really nice and clean, but I'd be a little worried that the top
(black) bar might be too 'hidden'-- I've often wandered around for ages
on sites like this, where there's some obvious primary navigation
mechanism (the tabs in this case) looking for a link I knew must be
there, only to discover there was a whole different set of links right
at the top that I hadn't noticed before.  But maybe that's just me :)

- (Wearing noob user's hat) Some of the links seem a bit vague, e.g.
what's the difference between the News link and the news I'm looking at
on the home page, and why should I ever need to visit an About page--
shouldn't all the other pages cover everything 'about' GNOME that I'd
ever want to know?  (Btw, has anyone done any card-sorting type
exercises to check that the categories we think make sense are the ones
our target audience thinks make sense?)

Cheeri,
Calum.
 
-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems