Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on my initial thoughts on the information architecture – it was certainly food for thought and, as a result of that and some more work on our part, we’ve moved on a little in our thinking – I’d like to share some thoughts and some questions with you now, for your consideration.
Download/Project
In my previous post I suggested that perhaps two different faces on essentially the same content could be valuable – one being ‘download’ which would be used by people who were using Drupal as a tool and looking for the core, modules and themes to download and use, and one being ‘Project’ which was targeted at developers involved in further developing and, of course, maintaining Drupal, the project.
After hearing all the feedback to this, I now agree that this is not a great idea – in a nutshell because, as you have said, we don’t want to create such a void between using Drupal and contributing. Also, given that we have a ‘getting started’ page, people who are less familiar with Drupal will be directed there, and from that section they can be given an easy guide to what to download and from where.
So, based on your feedback to date, let’s remove ‘Downloads’ as a section or sub-site.
Information Scent for Core/Modules/Themes/Translations: I’m thinking of a word that is *like* ‘Project’ but makes sense to ‘outsiders’
That leads me to one of the reasons I suggested ‘Downloads’ in the first place – being that ‘Project’ is a very ‘Drupal’ word. To someone who is versed in Drupal-speak, ‘Projects’ means ‘things that we’re working on, like the Core project, Modules, Themes, and even Translations/Localisation. But for someone who is NOT Drupal-speak-savvy, ‘Projects’ or even ‘The Drupal Project’ is not good information scent for really important (perhaps some of the most important) content on the site.
Non-Drupal-speak-savvy people will not look under ‘Projects’ for Downloading Drupal, Modules, Themes or Translations… so we need to come up with a label for this part of the site that makes sense to everyone. (Or, at least, gives them a clue of what might be contained within, sends them in the right direction).
The card sorting exercise gives us the following insight:
- When asked to categorise ‘Contributed Modules’ participants who identified as ‘outsiders’ used terms like ‘Development/Developers’ and ‘Downloads’.Â
- When asked to categorise ‘Themes’ participants who identified as ‘outsiders’ used terms like ‘Designers’ and ‘Downloads’.Â
- When asked to categorise ‘Translations’ participants who identified as ‘outsiders’ used terms like ‘About Drupal’ and ‘Developing’Â
Now, we know that we don’t want to use ‘Downloads’ because it doesn’t reveal the ongoing project work and encourage participation. I have given quite a bit of thought to creating ‘Developer’ and ‘Designer’ sections and splitting content off that way, but my gut feeling is that is a highway to pain – primarily because both the content and audience are rarely clearly divided into one of these categories – I imagine there would be an awful lot of crossover – and also because it seems unnecessary (and less than ideal) to divide the Drupal community by role.
That leaves us with the enormous question of – what do we call the section currently called ‘Download’ (on the Drupal website) and ‘The Drupal Project’ (on our proposed IA), from which the Core project, Modules, Themes and Translations can be accessed. It’s got me stumped for the moment, so I’d love it if you can throw some ideas at me.Â
Or perhaps the whole idea of having one section to house all of this is the problem, and we need to expose the contents of this section at a higher level?
Any thoughts you have on removing the ‘Downloads’ subsite and re-naming ‘The Drupal Project’ sub-site would be most welcome! (
Insiders and outsiders both!) :)