The homepage of GetKDE is essentially a hub with a teaser. The site structure itself is split into three sections, Software, Community, and Development.

Those completely new to everything KDE will start off in the Software section, via clicking the “Explore how KDE benefits me” option.

It is then important to market only what is relevant to the user – for KDE, this depends a lot on what device you have. KDE’s objective isn’t to convert users to Linux, however happy that makes our inner penguin, but instead to help people enjoy and make the most of their computing experience with KDE Software.

As a result, this is the page they will see. It’s objective is to make it clear what components make up a computer, which are Apps, Workspaces, and Framework. Different components will interest different people, and the availability of components are also limited depending on what the user is using. For example, Windows and Mac users won’t get a Workspace, but will get Apps and Framework. Mobile users get different Workspaces to non-mobile users. And so on.

The reason this initial segregation is so important is for several reasons:

1. They are introduced to the branding jargon that KDE users, eg Apps, Workspaces, Framework and understand how it fits together
2. This allows highly specific and targeted marketing in the next stage – no use comparing Kate to GEdit for a Windows user.
3. Users understand the scope of KDE development that it isn’t just limited to desktops/laptops and are flexible to bend around what people use.

In other related news, the GetKDE.org homepage itself got a bit of a cleanup, which you can check out live via the link here, or in the below screenshot.

That’s it for this post! More to come!

For those particularly interested in this project, progress is tracked via its WIPUP project space.

Related posts:

1. What’s up with KDE.org & Hello GetKDE.org
2. The kde-www war: part 4
3. The kde-www war: part 3

If you’re impatient, click here to check out the fresh WIPUP.org.

I’m very happy to announce version 11.11.11 being released today. It’s the first non-alpha/beta release, which means that I’m confident that it does what it’s meant to do, and so it’s ripe for the public to use it.

This release’s splash image is created courtesy of Erik Kylen from Blackmaze.

For those who are interested, you can read the release notes here which describe all the new stuff in this release.

I’m very curious to see where WIPUP goes to from here. Being the first non-testing release, it satisfies all of my personal needs for the system. There really isn’t anything else it needs to do. The only ones I can think of is the ability to mark projects as complete, or to download archives of projects, but both of those aren’t necessities.

It’s really been a joy developing WIPUP. I hope other people enjoy using it just as much as I do.

Enjoy the update, and I’m off for the day :)

Related posts:

1. WIPUP 22.04.11b released!
2. WIPUP.org – aiming small

Easter has started, and lots of interesting things are cropping up here and there – one of which is that WIPUP has seen a much-needed update. The last time this happened was way back in November, which is a stunning 5 months ago (yes, that’s almost half a year – doesn’t time fly?).

(Yes, it’s such a cliched and overdone splash screen – click it to read the release notes)

This release, unfortunately, isn’t a big one either. There weren’t any new features added at all, but instead consisted simply of visual polishing here and there to make it a more pleasant system to use and look at.

The reason for such a minor release after all this time is that WIPUP is maturing. WIPUP is aimed at a rather niche group – people who firstly are working on a moderate-to-long-term project. That already cuts out the average joe on the street. Then, that project must be something they are able to, and want to, share. That cuts out the majority of company-funded or commercial projects, as well as every person who is uncomfortable with showing work they think is “bad” and “incomplete”. WIPUP continues to slice away at the market by aiming at those who are comfortable with using a third-party system to host it, rather than their own setup, even though WIPUP is open-source and has an API.

For this niche, it satisfies all of its needs.

This niche – of which the target audience is (rather selfishly) myself.

Yes. You read that right. WIPUP was created for myself. If other people find it useful, then that’s great for them too. But all in all, I created this tool because I needed it. The idea for WIPUP was born by my desire to document the ThoughtScore project – my pet movie – in a more sane way than an increasingly large thread on the BlenderArtists forums. Has it succeeded? Yes. Is it still in use for that? Yes. It’s also used by me to document my work on the KDE.org redesign. It’s also used on my localhost to organise my scraps of work I produce for my architecture course, which will then be compiled into my portfolio.

What is my ambition?

Despite its selfish beginnings, there is a reason WIPUP was made open-source and then added the Open Collaboration Services API. This is because I have an ambition for WIPUP. I want it to be used by the end-users of open-source projects.

People are fascinating. The people who indulge in open-source are even more fascinating, because the average person is passionate enough about a cause like the open-source movement to turn it into their computing life, which is a large element of our lives nowadays. From that, most of you are working on really interesting projects on the side – learning a language, writing a book, composing a song, making a movie. I want WIPUP to exhibit the weird and wonderful of your creations – to emphasise and expose open-source’s greatest strength: the community. I’ve realised that when I threw myself in the wacky world of open-source that I discovered a goldmine of knowledge and passion. I want everybody to realise that too – and be proud of it.

What is your ambition?

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In this part, we’re going to take a step back to the release of the homepage design from part 3, and talk a little bit about the science and justifications behind the design. Firstly, a quick note that the design was tweaked slightly after part 3, as the tweaked version can be viewed here.

All webdesigns are made up of three vital elements that work together to make a successful design. Keep in mind that these elements should be considered not just in webdesign but also by application developers.

Notice how the criteria outlined in part 3 addressed each of those 3 concerns directly. Now let’s took at how we’ve satisfied the criteria.

Let’s just briefly skim through brand – we have addressed this by emphasizing KDE’s visual identity:

• The design has blue and white as its primary colours, which are KDE’s primary and secondary colours respectively.
• Every single environmental visual element (ie – headers, footers, and non-content elements) on the page used visual styles from Plasma’s Air and Oxygen styles.
• Every single functional visual elements (ie- the content element) on the page used KWin’s Air widget style.
• All graphical symbology use Oxygen icons, especially to thematically link together concepts across the design.
• The radical design choice of KDE’s first non-bordered layout corresponds to KDE’s philosophies of “Experience Freedom”, “Be Free” and “Breathe”.
• The lightened fonts after tweaking now also corresponds to KDE’s aforementioned philosophies.
• The iconic Kabel font is used for the KDE logo.

Now we can ask ourselves when we ask “What does KDE look like?“, as soon as we lay our eyes on this design, we can firmly answer “Yes. Of course! That is KDE!”

Now let’s look at the content. Content should always come before function, as it sets the scene and helps our users understand what they should expect from the page. We start by giving the most important bite-sized factoids: what is new and awesome, for our existing users audience, and what is this KDE anyway? for our new users audience. We do this by giving a large banner to represent the latest news for the existing users, as well as a large, digestible (free from jargon) definition for the new users. What is more important is if we study why we placed the elements exactly where they are. Let’s study the eye-movements as a user scans the webpage – red being spending more time looking at it, and green being quick glances:

Firstly, let’s just jump back to reality. It is important to realise that people do not scan a page top-down, they glance top-down, then return to the top then proceed to zig-zag occasionally. This means that some people might jump from 2-5, instead of 2-3 (ie- visually oriented people). Also, people do not analyse in detail whilst glancing through – they search for vital factoids and discard everything else. These have good and bad implications:

The good – this pattern and step-by-step process to grasp interest is aligned with the goals/roadmap we outlined in part 1 of this series.

The bad – we are heavily relying on the effectiveness of elements 2 and 3 to provide the vital factoids.  These must grasp interest. Element 3 will target the text-orientated people, who will hopefully see:

Notice how we have successfully separated people from product, and are marketing KDE as a community. The user is immediately not looking at “Hey, download powerful software and a new desktop interface!” (akin to “hey, get free animated emoticons now!“), but instead looking at “Hey, I’m the most important person here, and something is happening which involves me. Something to do with powerful software and beautiful desktops, which are lovely keywords which everybody can say ‘yes I want it’ to. What am I missing out on?“. This will bring them to element 5 – to Discover KDE, and start their journey.

For the picture-oriented people, element 2 is our vital grasper. As the design stands now, it is obvious that the eye lingers longer over the left side of the image (put the more beautiful part of the image there, then?) but otherwise the image is completely unenticing and uninformative. It shows a rotated desktop screenshot and that’s it. This is bad. This should be changed. The blurb is useful though, as it not only says there is some sort of release with a really long fancy name (Software Compilation, anybody? 6 syllables?), but also zeroes into the single key features why it is so awesome. However there is clearly work to be done on defining a visual style for the header image.

Finally, let’s look at the function. What the user will want to do on the webpage.

This is a little tricky, as the homepage is a hub, not a content deliverer. It’s function is as a signpost and not an infographic. For this the design’s function is to direct users to the right page, and allow the user to understand the structure of the webpage, so that he knows exactly what to do next and how things are categorised.

We’ve already done a bit of this by piquing new users’ interests with the blurb and having their eye naturally fall onto the “Discover KDE” part. However let’s take this a step further by thematically linking certain keywords on the page through sequencing them in the same way, as well as using visual icons to mark their similarities. This can be seen below:

This helps the user understand the site’s structure, or three main “sections”, and emphasises their importance through repeating the sequence again and again. Thus the “About” and “Give Back” sections are already given less priority as expected given our goals outlined in part 1 as well as our restructuring labels in part 2, without entirely ignoring them.

This also performs a very important function of all design: the ability to give the user the impression that they have freedom to choose a path, that they are in control, but subliminally guiding them through a sequenced, optimum path. The user is presented with – yes – the entire sitemap. They can read through every single link and understand exactly what the page contains, but are still inclined to follow the three set paths for them. Also shown in the tweaked layout is that only the Community column is highlighted whereas other sections are greyed out – this will not be so on the homepage (all will be greyed out) but this helps users understand which section they belong in (other colour visual indicators will be in play later). This achieves the structural segregation that the original redesign was aiming for, without being too intrusive or clunky.

I’m going to stop here. Those were the main points I wanted to talk about to help raise awareness of the importance of design. I hope you enjoyed this series, and I’ve submitted it as a GSoC proposal, so if all goes well, we can start seeing things live soon!

Related posts:

1. The kde-www war: part 3

Now that we know what we want to achieve and the structure of KDE.org, we can start thinking about the layout of the home page. The home page is – obviously – the most important page of the website. It acts as a central hub to link together everything that KDE has to showcase, it acts as the first stop for information for KDE newcomers, it acts as a publicity and news broadcast, it is the link between the various KDE sub-communities and communication channels, and most importantly, in today’s web-centric world, it defines KDE’s visual identity. After much debate, it had to satisfy the following criteria:

• Embodies KDE’s visual style and branding – ie, the Oxygen, Air, Breathe, and Be Free. It should be a design that when you see it, you say “that looks like KDE”
• It had to make people get KDE. To understand KDE not as a product and a software suite, but as a community. We want them to share with KDE’s passion. KDE has grown further than just a collection of apps and a desktop interface, and thus we can no longer be so shallow as to market it as such. We must follow our rebranding efforts to separate people from product, and emphasize open-source’s greatest strength – the community. We are a community, not a company. We create passion, not products.
• It had to showcase our latest and greatest event/release/activities. However we need to showcase it in a way that people understand. Saying “Akademy 2011 is here!” alone doesn’t mean anything. Nor does “KDE 4.6 released – experience freedom”. Let’s change that to have meaning.
• Clear segmentation between Software, Community and Development sections – to succeed where the current design fails. Let’s not make it a maze.
• Absolute directions towards the goals we outlined – Goal 1: to become a user of KDE. Goal 2: Say hi and tell us what’s up. Goal 3: would you like to scratch your own itch?
• Allow the user to understand how the site is structured and what exists without overwhelming them.

For this part of the war, I’m not going to write a wall of text. I’m just going to throw out the design right now, and let it speak for itself.

More to come. Let’s make a change.

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WIPUP was specifically built and tailored towards sharing works-in-progresses – ranging from a twitter-like update, to a fully formatted document complete with images, videos, and pastebin support. With WIPUP’s new FreeDesktop approved OCS (open collaboration services) REST API, it’s one step closer to turning the advanced Linux desktop into a Social Desktop.

Imagine being able to share what you’re working on immediately from KSnapshot, or finding a "Subscribe to this project" or "Track this developer" in Amarok’s About dialog.

It’s completely free to use and (of course) its entire codebase is open-source.

Check out the release notes, and then try it out if you haven’t already!

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The charming splash screen above was done by me on The GIMP. If enough people like it (just drop me a comment/mail/whatever) I will probably create a tutorial for some of it.

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WIPUP attained an important milestone today – its beta release. It’s now available for the public to use. WIPUP is a "web 2.0" technology application, to use the cliche term. However more importantly it’s the infrastructure behind and towards a unique Social Desktop tool. For those unfamiliar with what the Social Desktop embodies, allow me to quote:

[The] core idea of the Social Desktop is to connect to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself.

WIPUP is (in terms of this final goal) still in its infancy – there is no desktop client (yet), my plans for KDE integration are still on the drawing board, and no currently existing API implementation. But more important is what does exist, which is the tool – the platform behind all of these future possible interfaces which provides added convenience and flexibility towards any workflow. As such, I’m immensely happy to share this beta with all of you and invite you all to check it out and start using it. WIPUP is also open source and free software – so any interested developers (or anybody wanting to contribute) are welcome to join as well!

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Turns out they have an Oxygen theme! It’s a little dated but I must say I’m impressed. Very impressed.

Now all I have to do is find a practical personal use of EyeOS! Perhaps it might replace a few of my cobbled series of other cloudish hacks.

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