Design

Welcome @elliotlepers ! Self organization is the key here :) You guys should definitely get together maybe on IRC or just here and organize yourselves on how things work best for design stuff. Create wiki pages for the "team" and so on. Would totally love a small team to self-organize for some better collaboration on the design stuff.

Allright, is #diaspora-design @ irc.freenode.net okay? I think we should get this thing rolling :)

Hi all, I've been way too busy this past month, the proposal is still going and I've been working on some mockups for some incremental UX polishing on the current codebase.

Will get in touch more often from now, and on the IRC channel too.

@elliotlepers never got your e-mail, sorry! I'll look for it.

@hola : Hey ! Thats cool ! Header is almost finished. I'll need a piece of advice regarding the design.

Yes! And I have a crazy new design that needs your feedback. Based on that CSS you liked.

Can't wait to see that !

Hey guys! I was speaking to Steffen and jhass, and Steffen had this idea of posting a call for participation on the Diaspora HQ account asking people for Diaspora redesign ideas.

These are some screenshots from my working pod:

http://imgur.com/pC5GcfW,UbF3RwS,vJenkmR,9IrIxCR,ec1wmT7,l6hNPhn,Y8TSu7t#4

But those were meant to actually run on the current code, we will ask users for something with a much broader spectrum, to gather feedback on what they want, what they like, what they hate, etc.

So, what do you think about a Diaspora HQ post with something like:

"Hey, we are planning to do a redesign and we are collecting feedback.
Here are some ideas from Pablo Cúbico.
What do you think about them?
What are your ideas?

If you have mockups of any kind, even handwritten ones, post them with the hashtag #diaspora-redesign

We are looking forward to see your ideas!"

Yes I think that would be a good idea. The only problem is collecting the ideas and transferring them to somewhere. The DiasporaHQ account doesn't federate well, so comments might not all reach back to it.. So I would rather have people submit ideas and comments somewhere else, as weird as that sounds. Or we just collect the ones get back ;)

But in the end, that should just be feedback. The actual decisions should imho be made by the design team and then accepted or rejected by the community. We can't and won't be able to please everyone.

Great work btw! I like it. It is very different, but more modern. And the skinning idea would allow for different tastes. I would love to have the change skin buttons always visible for quick mood changes ;)

I like that it spans the whole screen. I think this would be a problem on really big screens, but that probably can be tuned with a simple CSS media query.

I agree with @jasonrobinson, pleasing everyone is impossible, and the design should be made by the design team, based on the feedback - as opposed to incorporate step-by-step different ideas we receive: this will lead us to the Frankenstein monster of social networks, instead of something beautiful and integrated.

There are a couple of suggestions I want to make:
1. the structure of the site could be more streamlined (or maybe a more exact word would be the navigation; you know, where the links to various parts of the site are, in how many steps can someone reach the profile editing page, and so on so forth) - maybe we should gather some metrics on how exactly we should do that, but at the moment is quite a mess.
2. the chat should be a more prominent feature. That's one of the feature I use the most, alongside with browsing the stream for pictures of silly cats. This means it should not be hidden in a drawer on the right - it's barely discoverable this way.
Also, from a technical standpoint, and UX - we have some problems with the conversations feature of the platform, because now it has feature overlap with the chat. @jhass - maybe we should drop conversations altogether? XMPP is an old, federated, and pretty solid protocol.