Community Portal In my inaugural post, I thought it best to dispense with the usual fluff and get right to the meat and potatoes of the new redesign of Joomla.org. There have been many questions and we have many answers.
I'll start off by giving a brief timeline. The project was initiated last year sometime, but due to the launch of Joomla 1.5 and resources allocated to that (understandably a priority) it didn't get into full swing until early February 2008—around the time the Joomla Communications Team was officially formed. One of our top goals was to fast-track the site redesign because it had been on the back burner for too long.
Our strategic approach to the project was fairly straightforward. We set out to accomplish a number of things:
- To restructure the Joomla family of Web sites in a more logical and easier to understand fashion, including better integration
- To clearly define the types of Joomla users, identify resources for each of those types, and make resources easy for each of those types to locate by consolidation and other means (focused streamlining)
- To bring more focus on the day-to-day community-driven aspects of the Joomla Project
- To identify and clarify site and Project nomenclature
- To bring a fresh, updated look with a consistent navigation style for all sites
This is not an exhaustive list, but were high-priority items. There were even things we didn't want to accomplish. The redesign was not intended to:
- Push Joomla in terms of what it can do or demonstrate its full potential
- Hide or make certain resources less easier to find or delete them altogether
- Make every single person happy
Again, not an exhaustive list. But of note was that getting a consensus on a design from everyone who visits Joomla.org would have been impossible. Think about the different types of users, tastes, opinions—it never would have happened.
The next three tasks occurred in tandem:
- Competitive audit: We performed a a visual and functional audit on the sites of other content management systems, analyzing what they do well and where they fail. This led to a summary of observations and requirements.
- Development of User Personas: Based on interviews with Joomla users (online and offline), obvious patterns were formed which categorized users into one of three persona groups:
- New users ("Beginners")- Users which are coming to Joomla for the first time, commonly to evaluate it for possible use on a project
- Regular users ("Intermediate")- Users which are designers, Webmasters, site admins and are currently using Joomla
- Developers ("Advanced")- Users which are "power users" and have a deeper level of programming experience. They probably have written an extension for Joomla or may have a business based around Joomla services.
Using each of these "persona shells," clearer and more defined user personas were developed with information gathered in our research.
- Development of the Information Architecture: We performed a content audit on all information contained on the Joomla family of sites and created an extensive IA based on the current setup. Then we hashed out the information taxonomies in a purely logical arrangement so the structure as a whole made sense from a purely informational standpoint, creating a new draft IA.
Taking each of the personas above and our first draft of the information architecture, the task was then to develop multiple user scenarios for each of those personas and test their tasks against the IA. How would users find the information they needed? How quickly? As you might have guessed, the IA (and subsequent wireframes) went through several rounds of refinement in order for it to become more task-focused.
The initial phase up until this point lasted about a month. We learned a lot about what Joomla users of all levels look for and how they look for it. My next posting will be about the next steps, including the design process.
