Re: Comments on hardware layout

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sat, 2011-04-09 at 18:06 -0400, Michael Hill wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 10:09 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > Goals:
> > * Make guides more compact and easier to scan. I want people
> >  to spend as little time as possible on guide pages.
> > * Trim down those links trails. Especially when we get guide
> >  pages linked from guide sections of essentially the same
> >  name: "Hardware > Printing >> Printing >>"
> >
> > So I took a stab at using the grid ("toronto") layout on the
> > hardware guide page. This is the same thing I did on prefs.
> > It's not done. I'm not sure what to do with some pages.
> >
> > Using the grid layout with links in descs gives us, I think,
> > a nice way of promoting some subtopics without introducing
> > extra link trails and guide links and navigational craziness.
> >
> > Patch attached. This is only on a local branch on my machine,
> > because I'm keeping master stable. I'd like feedback.
> 
> Yes, it's cleaner.  Would this be done with all the pages that have a
> heading in index.page?

Not necessary. Files has a special layout that I think works
pretty well for it. Now, we might want to do a grid for the
things that aren't in the top list. It's worth exploring.

I'm tending to like this kind of layout for "super guides",
i.e. guides that just collect other guides. The slick thing
we're doing with the grids is the desc links, and that only
makes sense if the primary links are guides themselves.

Plus, guides tend to have short titles that fit more nicely
in a three-column grid layout. If we packed a grid layout
full of titles like "Browse files on a server or network
share", I'm pretty sure we wouldn't like the results.

More specifically:

"Web, email & chat" Very few sections, each with very few
topics. "Internet connections" just serves as a shortcut
to a top-level guide, plus some promoted links (which is
what the grid layout with desc links is good at). But to
use a grid, we'd have to make guides for "Chat", "Email",
and "Browsing the web". And with the topics we have now,
the results wouldn't be very good.

"Sound, video & pictures" Kind of the same deal. The first
section is full of stuff that should arguably be findable
under "Hardware". So maybe there should be a "Sound" guide
that gets put in a grid on both "Hardware" and this guide.
But the sections in this guide aren't full enough yet.

"Internet & networking" This might work as a grid. There
are some topics at the top that I think just don't fit
into some subguide. So maybe an approach like "Files"
would be best.

"Universal access" I'm pretty happy with the results on
this guide. It's using titled linklist links, which is
not the norm. But for this guide, I like it.

"Tips & tricks" Unless we get a *lot* more tricks, extra
subguides is very much overkill. Leave it as is for now.
At about a dozen topics, investigate organizing it using
sections or the links element.

"Get more help" It's two topics. So, no on the grid.

--
Shaun