Topic on Talk:MediaWiki/Homepage improvements 2018

Updated box headers to describe actions instead of audiences in content phase; icons kept but updated in design phase

The three boxes per audience are fine, but their purpose should be made more obvious.

• The audience and their field of interest should be addressed directly in the title.
• Example: Current title “System Administration”
  • That should be replaced by “Install & configure MediaWiki” which is currently in second position only, but explains the path much better.
  • “System Administration” might be a correct summary, but not in the perspective of new visitors.
• Example: Current title “Using MediaWiki”
  • That should be replaced by something like “Content page reading, editing and maintaining”
  • This tells me much more what “using” shall mean.

The gimmick icons in the boxes might be kept.

• They give orientation for users who were used to them over years.
• Images give a better feeling when opening a page rather than a lot of text only.
• Currently it looks like the images are just decorative. It is not intuitive that they are linked to the current hub pages, which should be the major navigation place for the audience. Therefore the current hub might be never found.
• The expection by clicking on images may be to reach the file description page, explaining author and license of the image.
• The image and the box title bar should have identical link target.
• The images should be hidden from (smaller) mobile devices and blind people (role="presentation"). If not the only link to the audience landing page, but only additionally linked, they may be omitted.
• The same images (which might be exchanged by more intuitive ones) could serve as navigation eye catchers on the specific landing pages. It seems this is intended right now on the hub pages, but that is not intuitive now and I detected it after detailed user guidance analysis only.

The prominent link (entire title?) should be the central audience landing page.

• Some very important entry points might be listed below, as of today, serving as a shortcut to bypass the landing page.

In the current stage we are after defining the audiences that we should target on the front page. I agree names such as "Using MediaWiki" are not helpful, and having activity-based headers instead of role-based headers sounds like a good idea (or maybe both is possible, depends on the layout to be defined later).

Discussing the design is a later separate phase of the process, would be great if you could bring that up in that phase. Thanks!