Hello everyone! As you know we have concluded the first contest. We are all very happy with the number of submissions and the result we got out of it. We intend to do a second contest which instead is about designing our wiki / website. But before announcing this contest we would like your feedback.
What was good with the first contest, what was bad, what was damn ugly?
Help us improve the next contest by adding your comments to this blog post or just emailing contest@xmms.se.
Thanks!
8 comments:
The good: we got a lot of great submissions, and now we have a really cool logo! And a lot of feedback all along.
The bad: the delay between the moment we received design and when it was published (because of the tedious svg->png procedure); the voting procotol frustrated some of us, as it favoured the logos everybody liked over the favourite from each voter — I don't know if the vote could be made better though.
The ugly: Ø.
About the website redesign, I think there are two phases:
1) Reorganize the sections, pages and general map of the website. We should respect standard accessibility guidelines (quantity of information per page, number of choices, number of clicks).
2) Redesign the website graphically, as a Wikimedia theme, using standard XHTML/CSS (do wikimedia themes contain scripting/(X)HTML, or only CSS?).
I believe that we should first discuss the reorganization, so that the redesign can be applied on a sane content. The second phase would be the contest.
What d'you guys think?
I would also get rid of MediaWiki in favor of DokuWiki or alike, but that's a completely different story ;-) (just look at how to make a nice table with dokuwiki vs mediawiki)
All manual steps should have been eliminated before the contest started. This doesn't apply to the wiki contest I suppose.
Maybe the persons into the contest should be able to download a snapshot of our current wiki to use and abuse as they wish, without our users of course.
The good: Artists and commenters were very friendly and I think the iterative design went as planned.
The bad: Theefer summed this up well. The PNG rendering should have been automated and the Condorcet voting method was a bit frustrating, but with the number of submissions, I can't see anything better.
The ugly: Blogger. This should have been done on the Wiki to keep it together with the rest of the XMMS2 goings-on. Aside from that the Web-2.0-ishness of Blogger is annoying and CPU-wasting and the capchas prevented some people from commenting on submissions, which may have affected voting.
The next contest: I already really like the Wiki and so I'm somewhat opposed to a redesign. However, one thing the Wiki does need is organization. As developers are the main source of information on the Wiki and Sham has been the only one actively trying to keep it clean and presentable, much of the information is, say, less-than-friendly.
When I think of a good organization I think of what I expect when I visit a project website for the first time. Either I've just heard the name of the project and I'm looking to know what it's about or I know what it is and I want a download. In the former case, I expect to see a brief summary of what the project is, "XMMS2 is an intelligent, medialib-based, cross-platform music player. Learn more..." In the latter case, I expect to see a prominent download link, usually in the sidebar. The download page should let me select my platform and the download I want. So far, we don't have this and it's frustrating. Keep it simple!
The only other things the wiki could use are maybe a nice ricey theme and heavy use of templates and categories. Since, presumably, the contest winner will give us a website and then disappear, us developer folk are going to have to maintain it. And so the burden of keeping it organized doesn't fall onto the shoulders of one man (Sham) again, there should be a truckload of templates and categories for us to jot down organized information. Right now, information is strewn across pages, formatted inconsistently, and duplicated.
All in all, I feel these improvements can be done by us, the XMMS2 team, if we just set some clear goals. So, you can imagine, I'm still a bit averse to the idea of a web design contest as opposed to a wiser investment. But, if there's nothing better out there, this'll save us a bit of work and I can't argue.
Sorry for the long comment, but I feel it's important. :)
My web site is a contest web site, have a look at http://www.buzzerme.com
It contains bikini contest, fashion contest, sex contest. We will launch the web site asap with prices like PS3
Fantastically great submission of great logos. Choice is a matter of personal taste so those who didn't win... it was a lottery. Still the winner is a very good specimen....
XMMS2 is a great lightweight convenient background music player! Especially that I can stay up to date on my track changes using OSD popups!
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