Redesign of dlang.org

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 April 2014 at 03:20:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
>> Trying to be clever? Obviously not.
>
> I don't understand the motivation of this quip.

You don't understand that it is offensive to respond to an 
intelligent question by posting a Google query? As a project 
maintainer you should know better.

If dlang.org is being used by a programmer for 2-3 hours daily, 
then it is his use scenario that matters. The ability to adapt is 
more important for a documentation site than for a news site.

There are many good reasons to scale up to insane widths, 
basically to cut down the length of the rendered page to get an 
overview. To get less prose and more code on the page. Many of 
the dlang pages suffers from being too long, information sought 
is "hidden".

The user is always right… as the a designer you cannot tell the 
user he is wrong (well, you can, but that will only piss him 
off). So if Kagamin is comfortable with wide windows then that 
most certainly is the right thing for him.

Anyway, you guys are taking this process in reverse. You should 
start with use cases, then the requirements, then content, then 
functionality, then marginal design, then figure out what you 
need in addition in terms of styling.

The current documentation is not very user friendly, no amount of 
styling will fix that. Styling will only make it look like you 
have your priorities wrong. Put a dress on a pig and it will 
still be a pig, an odd one. (In the commercial sector you start 
with stylish mockups, but that is only a political move to get 
thumbs up, it is not a good idea since it can lock down 
expectations too early.)

A redesign ought to:

1. cut down on the number of operations to find the information 
sought.

2. maximize vertical information flow to avoid exessive scrolling 
(that means get rid of the top bar on doc pages)

I think you need to improve ddoc and get more semantics into the 
markup.

> Today's crop of browsers are tabbed, and for many users the 
> position of the browser window is dictated by external 
> constraints (relation to other windows, external monitor or not 
> etc) and it's unreasonable to demand resizing the window 
> whenever they swap tabs.

I would image the primary usage scenario is to have dlang 
alongside your editor. (Doing a mobile-first design for dlang is 
something I don't get the point of.)

Ola.