Feature #3411
closedPlacement of Personal Homepage
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Description
During our community team call today (Chris, Micki, and I were on the call), Chris brought up an issue related to the personal homepage (PH). He pointed out that there is a usability issue if users not just are taken to the personal homepage after logging in, but literally are completely unable to get to the traditional homepage after logging in. It creates a sense of loss of place.
Because of that issue, Chris suggested that we rethink making the PH completely replace the traditional homepage after login.
I agree with Chris here, and I think that Micki does as well, and so I think we should adopt something like the following plan:
-- after login, users are shown the personal homepage
-- we should add a new menu item to the nav bar (under the logo, with Home, People, Groups, etc) after login where this page will be. I suggest that it should be a completely new top-level item called "My Commons" (or something like that). Of course, there are other options (like putting it under news or home), but it should be clear where users are located once they log in, as they may feel a bit of discombobulation. Having a top-level nav menu item highlighted would address that and also allow people to get back to the traditional homepage.
Let's discuss, here and in person on Friday.
Updated by Boone Gorges over 9 years ago
- Target version set to 1.7
literally are completely unable to get to the traditional homepage after logging in. It creates a sense of loss of place.
I disagree. Twitter and Facebook are two notable examples of sites where there is no "traditional homepage". If the relevant content from what we currently show on commons.gc.cuny.edu is also shown on the personal homepage, then there's no reason to have access to the logged-out version, and replacing it (rather than supplementing it) results in less redundancy. Adding a navigation item clutters an already complex navigational schema, for little benefit.
Think about your own use honestly - try to ignore the amount of thought and work you've put into the existing homepage, and forget about how much you may or may not like the way it works. As an active user of the home page, what good is it? What content are you actually consuming there? Do you ever spend more than three seconds there (the time it takes to click through to the stuff you actually want to see)? If I'm right, and the homepage doesn't actually provide value to existing users, then we should work to make it better for existing users. And that's the angle that the "personal homepage" argument comes from.
All that being said, whatever the group wants to do is fine. The development team will need a few details to proceed:
- What will the nav item say?
- Where will the nav item appear? In the main nav (under the site title)? In the admin bar?
- Will logged-out users see the new nav item (leading perhaps to a register or log in page)?
- What will be the URL of the new page?
Updated by Raymond Hoh over 9 years ago
Misread the ticket description. Apologies!
I think the main issue about navigating back to the PH is to educate users on the existing "Home" tab.
Some other suggestions:
- Add another link under the user nav in the WP admin bar and label it "Home" or "My Commons" ("Personal Homepage" sounds too wordy). This would go above "My Activity".
- Link the user's avatar in the WP admin bar to the PH.
Both of these options are unobtrusive and do not require adding another nav item under the main CAC logo.
Updated by Chris Stein over 9 years ago
The one thing I think we're all in agreement on here is that after login the user should be taken to the Personal Homepage (unless of course there is a redirect action because they clicked a forum post in an email or something like that).
The two questions at hand are
1. Should the Personal Homepage completely replace the current homepage?
2. How to navigate to the Personal Homepage (and the homepage if we keep both).
1. Replace or not to Replace
Boone, I hear your arguments re Facebook/Twitter and usage but I disagree. The Facebook/Twitter analogies fall short because they don't have a history of having a public homepage with content on it. In both sites there's not much you can do if you're not logged in. It's different on the Commons. Here we would be effectively removing a page people were used to seeing and also giving a single navigation item, Home, two functions depending on whether you were logged in or not.
Your arguments about the use of the homepage are valid. Active users don't get much from the current homepage and the personal homepage is meant to address that. This is one of the reasons that users should be directed to the personal homepage on login. There may be times however when logged-in users would want to see the current homepage. Newer users may get more from it (if they haven't joined groups or made friends then there won't be as much info on their personal homepage) and there are other possibilities.
2. Navigating to the Personal Homepage
What I would like to propose is that we think about two groups of pages, Commons Pages and Personal Pages. The Commons pages are public pages and are the ones in the current main navigation (Home, People, Groups, Blogs, Wiki, News, Help, About) and the Personal Pages only accessible to logged in users and are the ones we are putting in the new template (My Homepage, My Groups, My Sites, My Friends, My Messages, My Settings, My Activity, My Notifications, Send Invites).
- Commons Pages: The current main navigation and the current leftmost navigation in the WP Admin Bar.
- Personal Pages: The new right side navigation in the new template and the rightmost navigation (under the avatar) in the WP Admin Bar. Once we sort out the naming and the order these two navigations should have the same names and be in the same order.
In following with that I disagree with Matt's proposal to add a navigational element for the personal homepage to the current main navigation as it would confuse the two groups. Ray's suggestion of adding a link to the WP Admin Bar is in line with the groups and I would also recommend that. I would make the name My Homepage and have it both in the WP admin bar and in the right side navigation in the new template.
I would like to keep the action of clicking an avatar consistent so I would not recommend and avatar linking to the personal homepage but rather keep all avatars linked to the portfolio page.
There is one last piece that may cause discussion: what to do when the user enters http://commons.gc.cuny.edu (or cuny.is)?
My proposal is to keep the system Ray currently has in place which sends logged in users to the personal homepage and non logged in users to the Commons homepage. Then I also suggest adding a new page replicates the Commons homepage and that the two Home links (in main navigation and left dropdown in the WP Admin bar) link to this new page instead of just commons.gc.cuny.edu.
This solution would hopefully address Boone's concern that power users need not see the Commons hompage. They would only see it if they clicked on one of the Home Links. At the same time it keeps the two navigational spaces separate.
Updated by Boone Gorges over 9 years ago
- Status changed from Assigned to Resolved
- Assignee changed from Boone Gorges to Raymond Hoh
For 1.7, the issue has been resolved as follows:
- The My Commons page will be at http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/my-commons/
- Users will be redirected to my-commons when logging in from commons.gc.cuny.edu. Log-in redirect behavior from other URLs will not be affected
- A new nav item "My Commons" is added as the first item in the navigation below the site logo
- No broader changes are being made at this time to other "personal" pages
All of this has been implemented by Ray. I'm going to mark this general ticket as resolved. If there are outstanding issues with the implementation, let's open a specific ticket for discussion.