User:Dria/Session

In the "Mozilla Developer Center feedback session" I'm hoping to get developer feedback about the MDC -- What are we doing right? What could we be doing better? What features/services/facilities could we provide to make developers' lives easier or more productive? Any constructive feedback you can provide will be useful.

Any feedback you would like to give here, feel free to add directly to this page. Thanks! -- Dria 12:01, 28 June 2006 (PDT)

Session notes

• Modify skin and front page so there's less screen real-estate take up by non-content. Get rid of the sidebar for default skin and maybe turn the front page into a three column layout: first two columns as the existing Topics index, and the third for featured info and news feeds.

• Provide a quick-and-easy method for users to provide feedback -- possibly a link on each page that allows them to send comments if a particular page doesn't have the information they need or isn't what they expected, etc. Not like the MSDN "Rate this page" feature, but something more concrete and specific. People tend to not bother giving feedback if they find what they want, so feedback would generally be given when there's some sort of problem.

• MDC search sucks. We know this but need to fix it. This should be a high priority. Sheppy suggested we have a method for logging searches and search results so we can get concrete data on what people are looking for and whether they find it or not.

• Linking to specs and spec pages as granularly as possible would be useful. Also link to LXR source from pages where appropriate/possible (ie: XUL Reference links to LXR sources).

• Chunking pages is not that useful. Long pages are ok since "find in page" makes it easy to actually find stuff in pages. Fewer longer pages instead of chunked up shorter pages. This was brought up specifically in regards to the JavaScript Reference. (Possibly bring the pages together via includes for the reorganization where it makes sense?)

• Talk pages aren't terribly useful -- maybe figure out how to integrate a web forum (or mail/news) so each wiki page has a related forum/mail/news thread that people can read and leave comments on. (Ideally, I think, something with RSS feeds at various granularities.)

• MDC could possibly host all development roadmaps and schedules, as well as a conferences/events calendar.

• We don't currently have a way to add metadata effectively to pages, nor generate printable and static versions of the documentation for download. These are longer-term issues we will have to deal with.

• In general MDC is referenced often and when people are sent to it to get information they tend to find what they're looking for.

• Get MDC hooked into the webstats system so we can get more concrete data on how people are using the site.