The story of one usability disaster.
Below is a translation of the entry from the blog of Miguel de Icaza, one of the creators of Mono - a cross-platform environment for developing and executing .NET applications.
In December, someone asked me how many Mono distributions downloaded from the site during the month to estimate the number of program users. Although in the case of applications such as Mono, the number of downloads does not matter much, because most of our users get the program through other distribution channels or as part of software packages.
Since we do not have much space on the machine with distributions, we do not keep logs for too long, and they are rather quickly replaced with more recent ones, but at least we could make a rough estimate based on the statistics for the week. Due to the fact that the case was December 27, the data did not reflect the real picture too much, but I was just curious.
')
What I found with horror when I looked through the logs was that people using Windows and MacOS downloaded the program two years ago. The most frequently downloaded version was Mono 1.1.7 (released sometime in May 2005).
Only 5% downloaded the latest version of Mono for Mac, 95% downloaded the two-year-old version. I do not have at hand accurate data on the Windows version, but they were no less terrible (specified the same 95%).
In the case of Linux downloads under RPM, the situation was much better (probably due to the fact that people needed to choose their architecture from a separate list). But almost a third of all visitors downloaded the “universal loader” with the same old version.
After analyzing the referrer links from the logs, we saw that the problem was partly in people putting a direct link to a specific version, but it still could not explain the popularity of a particular release of Mono version 1.1.7, and the logs were rather strange - people Apparently, we chose it from our list of options.
It did not fit in our head.
Do you see the reason?
I clicked on our links - everything was in order. The latest version was loaded, which was reflected in the logs. I was confused.
Only after a while I understood what was the matter:
Since we used MediaWiki for our site, adding small nice icons for each platform, clicking on the picture led the user to the page of this image. In the case of Windows, this was the page:
mono-project.com/Image:Mono_icon_windows.gif
On this page was the image itself and automatically generated content related to it. Including there was a list of all pages that link to the icon:
So, having looked at this chaotic page, the majority of users chose the largest number of all those on this list, which was just the old page for release 1.1.7 . There was a page very similar to the main download page, and people guessed this time: “click not on the picture, but on the text”. Except that now they downloaded this ancient release.
I have no idea how long this lasted, but it was a real disaster.
We quickly corrected this — fortunately, you can replace the [[Image: Blah.png]] markup in [url] in MediaWiki, and if this link points to an image, then a non-clickable image is inserted into the page.
But this quick fix did not solve another problem: we probably had the worst download page in the history of mankind. She was just terrible, that you can still see in the archives .
Over the past few weeks we have written a draft of a new download page . Users will now be sent there. Thanks to the whole team in Provo who developed this new system and the guys from xml who tested it.
There still needs to be done something, but this page is no longer the catastrophe that was there before. Fortunately, from December 27 or around this date, people finally began to download the latest version of Mono.
And we, of course, feel just awful before those 95% of users who wanted to try the program on Windows and Mac and as a result received Mono two years ago.
Techme translations
In December, someone asked me how many Mono distributions downloaded from the site during the month to estimate the number of program users. Although in the case of applications such as Mono, the number of downloads does not matter much, because most of our users get the program through other distribution channels or as part of software packages.
Since we do not have much space on the machine with distributions, we do not keep logs for too long, and they are rather quickly replaced with more recent ones, but at least we could make a rough estimate based on the statistics for the week. Due to the fact that the case was December 27, the data did not reflect the real picture too much, but I was just curious.
')
What I found with horror when I looked through the logs was that people using Windows and MacOS downloaded the program two years ago. The most frequently downloaded version was Mono 1.1.7 (released sometime in May 2005).
Only 5% downloaded the latest version of Mono for Mac, 95% downloaded the two-year-old version. I do not have at hand accurate data on the Windows version, but they were no less terrible (specified the same 95%).
In the case of Linux downloads under RPM, the situation was much better (probably due to the fact that people needed to choose their architecture from a separate list). But almost a third of all visitors downloaded the “universal loader” with the same old version.
After analyzing the referrer links from the logs, we saw that the problem was partly in people putting a direct link to a specific version, but it still could not explain the popularity of a particular release of Mono version 1.1.7, and the logs were rather strange - people Apparently, we chose it from our list of options.
It did not fit in our head.
Do you see the reason?
I clicked on our links - everything was in order. The latest version was loaded, which was reflected in the logs. I was confused.
Only after a while I understood what was the matter:
Since we used MediaWiki for our site, adding small nice icons for each platform, clicking on the picture led the user to the page of this image. In the case of Windows, this was the page:
mono-project.com/Image:Mono_icon_windows.gif
On this page was the image itself and automatically generated content related to it. Including there was a list of all pages that link to the icon:
So, having looked at this chaotic page, the majority of users chose the largest number of all those on this list, which was just the old page for release 1.1.7 . There was a page very similar to the main download page, and people guessed this time: “click not on the picture, but on the text”. Except that now they downloaded this ancient release.
I have no idea how long this lasted, but it was a real disaster.
We quickly corrected this — fortunately, you can replace the [[Image: Blah.png]] markup in [url] in MediaWiki, and if this link points to an image, then a non-clickable image is inserted into the page.
But this quick fix did not solve another problem: we probably had the worst download page in the history of mankind. She was just terrible, that you can still see in the archives .
Over the past few weeks we have written a draft of a new download page . Users will now be sent there. Thanks to the whole team in Provo who developed this new system and the guys from xml who tested it.
There still needs to be done something, but this page is no longer the catastrophe that was there before. Fortunately, from December 27 or around this date, people finally began to download the latest version of Mono.
And we, of course, feel just awful before those 95% of users who wanted to try the program on Windows and Mac and as a result received Mono two years ago.
Techme translations
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/31385/
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