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- Good breakdown of sections into logical parts.
- Navigation menu - not clear that clicking a menu item that has sub-items will reveal unique content. Typical menu convention has content at leaves / children.
- AB: We are using Drupal Nice Menus to allow users quick access to content without having to click through a hierarchy of pages. There may be other, better choices but I've explored a few and this seemed to be the best based on what I saw. I'm not sure I really understand the problem you're describing, though? Pages in the left nav with children have ">" next to the page title and mousing over a page title reveals the children underneath. The alternative to using Nice Menus would be that the user would have to click on the page to find out whether it has children, so exposing them on mouseover seems more efficient. There is a bug to Add styling to "Nice Menus" pullout menus in OSDPL (http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-935) so perhaps that might address the issue?
- JH: May need to revisit this during the Architecture phase. I can foresee a problem where there are too many sub-items and navigating through it would be too tedious. Also having the current menu not behave like a typical menu could be confusing. Perhaps there's another way of presenting our structure and content?
- Navigation menu - not clear that clicking a menu item that has sub-items will reveal unique content. Typical menu convention has content at leaves / children.
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- FF3 on Windows, mousing over 5-star plugin causes the right sidebar to shift up and down. Only happens if the DP already has a rating. Fine in IE7.
Right column
JH: Perhaps the root of the issue is that the right hand column is being used to display content that requires more room to properly convey. Aside from announcements, any Story content is being published there. Maybe announcements should be on the front page main content and moved out from the right-hand column?
- Confusing when no Category follows the word "in". Currently it says "Posted July 3rd, 2008 by abloodworth in" followed by blank space. [AB: This is a reported bug: OSDPL: Remove "in" from OSDPL pages that aren't in a category(http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-595)]
- The same information about the events (such as date and time) are repeated in small and large fonts [AB: This is because the story title and the beginning of the content is displayed, and you may have been looking at a story or two where there content was very similar. This is not the normal case.]
- "Login or register to post" is repeated after each OSDPL News post. [AB: Perhaps we should change the wording to "Login or register to comment" since we don't allow just anyone to post a news story. I think it would also disappear if we didn't allow anyone to comment on News stories.]
- "comments" and "Read more" are also repeated, which may be on purpose. One might question the value of the "Read more" link, since the title of the event brings up the page with the details. Small inconsistency: "comments" is not capitalized, "Read more" is. [AB: We *could* remove this programmatically, but I think it's a fairly consistent news metaphor to have "read more" if you show just the beginning of a news story. If we needed the space to show more stories, it might make sense, but could take some effort which we'd have to weigh against.]
- A user may expect the "more tags" link below the tag cloud to expand the section to show more tags. Currently it brings user to a page with the same list of tags. [AB: This is only because currently there are very few tags. When there are more tags than fit in the "Find patterns by tag" box, more will be displayed. I don't think there's any action needed.]
JH: Perhaps the root of the issue is that the right hand column is being used to display content that requires more room to properly convey. Aside from announcements, any Story content is being published there. Maybe announcements should be on the front page main content and moved out from the right-hand column?
Main column
- "Recent Comments" on the center column - unclear if that comment applies to the main page itself or if it's a recent comment for a page somewhere else not seen.
- [AB: I believe this is recent comments on patterns. We could delete it unless we think it's helpful for people to see what people are talking about in the library (it may not be now, but I think it might be in the future, if it will fit nicely in the page). In that case we may want to rename it "Recent Pattern Comments" and perhaps put a visual separator between it and the main content of the page, or move it to another part of the page.]JH:That's good! Perhaps we should change the title to be a bit more clear about the context.
- "Patterns Discussion" or "Patterns Comments"? Intentionally dropped the word "Recent" since it seems implicit.
* "Printer-friendly version" link is sometimes placed at the bottom of the page and sometimes at the top. Provide printable pages for the design patterns pages only.
**[AB: What is the reasoning behind making only the DP pages printable? I think there will be many pages users could want to print, such as the contributors guide, copyright policy, about the library, etc. The link should be made consistent, though, and I'd recommend entering a bug.]
There is an invisible link **JH: Although it does seem pointless to have a printing functionality for every page, I think we should offer it just in case. I wouldn't feel bad about doing this if we can somehow make it an image (with appropriate alt-text) instead of a text link. The text link gets obscured when there is a lot of text.
* There is an invisible link after the vertical bar in "Printer-friendly version |"
** [AB: Good catch; we should enter a bug for this.]Navigation should enter a bug for this.]
JH: I'm thinking this is a bad accessibility bug. It will take a screen reader user to a page we did not intend or create. Could create a navigational mess since it messes up the perceived structure of the site.
- Navigation correctly has higher priority. The first tabbable group after the header/banner.
**[AB: There is a "Skip to main content" link which gets users directly to the main content, skipping the navigation. Isn't that the best practice?]
**JH: You're right and I think this note was made to say we're doing this correctly. Added the word "correctly" to the note to clarify.
Styling
- Various font sizes and colours are used in this section, which makes it difficult to see at a glance where one section starts and ends.
- "OSDPL News" header smaller and less bold than the links that are following. [AB: This is indeed a problem. There is a bug for doing a general overhaul of the CSS (FLUID-508), but perhaps we should enter smaller bugs for specific issues like this that come up. In this case, we need to change the styling on the <a> within an <h2>. Perhaps for now just making it not bold? I think the color could be tweaked slightly as well, but it may be better to do that as part of a more comprehensive overhaul of the styling.]
- "more tags" should be distinguished from the other links in the tag cloud. [AB: This is probably a low priority issue, as currently the link is distinguished by it's placement and the whitespace around it. We do also want consistency among the links in the site, but we could consider making the tags themselves a different font (since they are sort of different links.]
- Difficult to see green links against a white background when the fonts are small. [AB: Could we make them a deeper green? We might want to run them through the Color Contrast Analyzer: http://juicystudio.com/services/colourcontrast.php\]
- "in" and "<category name>" are on separate lines. [AB: It certainly would be nice to have them on the same line to save space, but I'm not sure that's urgent. Probably a lower priority bug?]
- Extra line spacing within "Related Patterns" and "Contributors" sections in a design pattern. [AB: I would suggest making this part of this bug: OSDPL: Finalize Design Pattern submission form & node display (http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-507) as I think it would be easiest to tackle this with other related changes.]
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