Hello, everyone! As Markos has indicated several times previously, we’re working on a bit of a design refresh for the Front Page. In the course of those discussions, we’ve realized that we’ve long taken for granted that the casual reader — one coming to the site from a search result or social share or aggregator link, but who doesn’t have much prior knowledge about this place — can scan the Front Page and just intuit how all the sections fit together, intuit what the differences are between the sections, and make sense of the headers, bylines, and Staff/Community byline tags.
We’ve also assumed that it’s obvious why a casual reader should then want to register a community account and join the fun, and clear enough how to do so.
It should be obvious, right? Yet looking at the Front Page through the lens of the casual reader, and taking aboard comments from confused potential account registrants at Help Desk as well as critical comments from some pretty savvy partners about the account registration experience (“intimidating” is a word we hear for that experience, and that is so not a good word), it’s evident that we need to improve communicating how the Daily Kos Community is unique and why a newcomer should want to join, and we should also make the entry-point for account registration more prominent than the easily overlooked “Sign Up” button in the top navigation bar.
So as part of the design refresh we’re going to position a “Daily Kos Community” header and text-box above the Trending Stories section of the Front Page, and we’ll duplicate some of the account and navigation buttons to make better logical sense of the community platform. Ignore the fonts and button styling, please, as the following image is a very preliminary mock-up.
The question is then how to describe the Daily Kos Community and the array of features that sustain this place (commenting, writing a story, community groups, etc.) in a brief and compelling way?
I say who better to imagine the text of that short descriptive paragraph than all of you who use the site every day, and have found meaningful community here, you who “came for the politics and stayed for the community.”
So here’s the mission, should you choose to accept it: in a few sentences, how would you describe the Daily Kos Community to that casual reader? What do you think they need to know about this community, and about what they can find and do here?
Let’s hear it. The lorem ipsum can’t carry the day!
