Reimagining www.asp.net, Part One: The Home Page Experience

Before I begin with Part 1, I want to add an additional disclaimer. The ideas I present in these articles are not necessarily new, clever, novel, etc. Many times I will be describing a feature that already exists in some form either on the ASP.NET site itself or other sites (including competing frameworks). I do not intend to take credit for each feature presented. My goal is to combine the best ideas and features to create a whole that is more valuable than its individual parts.

The Home Page Experience

A good home page quickly moves a user closer to their final destination on a site. On the ASP.NET site, the home page presents a unique challenge: how do you adequately serve both new users who have no idea about the what, why and how of ASP.NET and experienced users who have come back to get the latest info or interact with the community?

This leaves us with two somewhat competing goals:

1. Guide new users to the appropriate ‘Get Started’ section for their skill level.
2. Provide an overview of what’s new and notable in the community.

With these goals in mind, I put together a mockup of what the home page could look like. I Am Not a Designer™ so it’s intentionally light on the polish. I put this together to demonstrate intent and no more (as you can see by my egregious use of copy and paste). Think of it more as a sketch than an actual design. I just happen to sketch with Fireworks 8.

Guiding New Users

The goal list above is a little misleading. If I could more accurately prioritize the goals of the home page, it would look more like this:

1. Help new users
2. Help new users
3. Help new users
4. Help new users
5. What’s new and notable

Since it’s by far the most important goal of the home page, it needs to be the most prominent part of the page. We can’t account for everyone, but I think there are three major types of new users: complete beginners, experienced non-web developers and web developers familiar with other development stacks. Every type of new user needs to be able to quickly find relevant information tailored to their experience level. (I’ll cover the needs of the different types in more detail in Part 2.) It should be immediately obvious where their starting point is.

Once a user has moved beyond needing the introductory material, they can hide that content area and allow the other features to move into a more prominent position on the page. Or the beginner stuff can be replaced with more advanced material.

What’s New and Notable

The www.asp.net needs to be the authoritative source for the latest official news and announcements. When something is announced, you want the first place people check to be the official site. You have to earn that trust though by posting consistently high-quality and relevant content in a timely manner. This is the perfect opportunity to create an official ASP.NET blog.

ScottGu’s blog is current serving this purpose. A lot of what he writes could be moved to the site as a post on the official ASP.NET blog. Having the posts on Scott’s blog works for those of us who know he is and how he fits into the overall scheme of things, but if you’re not familiar with the org structure of DevDiv the posts would carry more weight being on the main site. Scott puts out such great content. It deserves more than a link to a community blog site sitting on a subdomain.

Google really excels in this area. All their major products have their own blogs that are frequently updated with quality information. If something is wrong with Gmail, the Gmail blog is the first place you go (after complaining about it on Twitter) to find out what’s up. If there are new features, they’re announced there. For the most part, we’ve been conditioned to trust that the Google blogs will give us the information we need, when we need it.

The rest of the home page is designed to aggregate the most noteworthy content from the rest of the site. The community/social features will be covered in Part 3 and the toolbox features will be covered in Part 4.

Ads

If you’re familiar with the current site, you’ll notice one huge difference in my mockup from the current site. There are no ads in my design. This is 100% intentional. Microsoft has repeatedly drawn fire for including ads on this site. Unfortunately Microsoft’s reasoning is hard to defend. The justification that the ads exist to offset the cost of running the site is indefensible for a company Microsoft’s size. There have been other reasons proffered as well, but I don’t think any of them are compelling enough to justify having ads on the home page. They do nothing to serve either of the primary goals I identified above; in fact they detract from them.

Let’s look at it from the perspective of someone with PHP experience that has started a new job and needs to get started with a new project that has to be ASP.NET. When they head to the site, do you want to distract them with hosting offers or do you want to get them up to speed as quickly as possible?

Putting ads on a site also changes the relationship between the user and the site. Visitors are indirectly informed that they’re there to be sold to. When you want to learn something new, do you want to wade through a sales pitch or get right to the tutorials? If you’re trying to sell someone on using your framework, do you want to simultaneously sell them something they don’t need yet?

There are places in my redesign where ads will find a home and feel more natural and complementary to their surroundings instead of distracting. The home page is just not the place for them. You’ll see in the mockup that a commercial product is featured in the toolbox features. This is not an ad. It will be explained in Part 4.

Thus concludes Part 1. In Part 2, I’ll cover the ‘Get Started’ and ‘Support’ sections and what the experience should be like for learning and getting help.

What do you think? What should be on the home page? What shouldn’t be on the home page? Do you agree with the priorities and goals I’ve set? Let me know what you think.