Dear Developers,
This is an interesting brand confusion issue that I want to bring up. Users who visit the Inkscape website exhibit sometimes some key confusions which I'm not entirely sure how to fix:
1. That Inkscape requires them to register for an account in order to download. This is not true, but users have been trained by proprietary service vendors to register accounts for everything to get access. Help requests from users who forget their password or can't activate their accounts indicate that they only wanted to download Inkscape.
2. That the gallery on the website /is inkscape/, this is a much rarer problem. But sometimes people upload things to the Inkscape gallery in order to somehow get the website to perform actions or 'use' Inkscape via a web interface. This is likely because many users are trained to think of apps as websites and the website offers some abilities which could be confused for entry points into Inkscape functionality. This presents as moderation flags, usually people uploading photos and asking why Inkscape can't be accessed.
These are issues that may get worse as more and more people get computers which are not-desktops. Phones, tables, whatever chromebooks are. And I can imagine there might be some simple changes to help direct people more.
Thoughts?
Best Regards, Martin Owens
1. Make the "Download" button green (the whole button). 2. Change the tiny gallery icon up in the corner to a larger button that says "gallery" or some such. The reason people are confused might be because tiny icons with no description are what they have come to expect a graphics editing application. Adding descriptive text may help tell them what to expect.
As a side note, I always forget about that tiny button when I want to upload something. It would be good to also have an upload link as the first icon in the main gallery. See attached for a suggestion.
-C [image: add_image_inkscape_website.png]
On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 4:08 PM <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
Dear Developers,
This is an interesting brand confusion issue that I want to bring up. Users who visit the Inkscape website exhibit sometimes some key confusions which I'm not entirely sure how to fix:
- That Inkscape requires them to register for an account in order to
download. This is not true, but users have been trained by proprietary service vendors to register accounts for everything to get access. Help requests from users who forget their password or can't activate their accounts indicate that they only wanted to download Inkscape.
- That the gallery on the website /is inkscape/, this is a much rarer
problem. But sometimes people upload things to the Inkscape gallery in order to somehow get the website to perform actions or 'use' Inkscape via a web interface. This is likely because many users are trained to think of apps as websites and the website offers some abilities which could be confused for entry points into Inkscape functionality. This presents as moderation flags, usually people uploading photos and asking why Inkscape can't be accessed.
These are issues that may get worse as more and more people get computers which are not-desktops. Phones, tables, whatever chromebooks are. And I can imagine there might be some simple changes to help direct people more.
Thoughts?
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
Regarding #2, typically (from the cases I've seen) this seems to be happening with people who think they can convert a photo to some kind of cuttable file. Personally, I'm convinced it's coming from confusing language on the website of some cutting software, which leads them to think they can get a cuttable file from the Inkscape website. But I probably haven't seen every case.
When I contact people who have uploaded photos (as a moderator), I've added a comment to the message I send them, that if this is what they wanted to do, they will need to download Inkscape.
As a possible solution, if someone chooses the Photo category, could that trigger some kind of message that they are only uploading the image to the gallery, and that nothing else can be done with the photo?
Personally, I've been wondering why we have a photo category. There is really only one reason someone could use that category, and still be promoting Inkscape. And that is to show the real life usage of whatever they made with Inkscape. I wonder if there would be some way to block photos, but still allow JPG formats? (Although I might not be opposed to disallowing any JPG/JPEG.) I'm not sure if just removing the Photo category would do that. But in any case, the vast majority of photos are deleted.
For problem #1 - that surprises me! Maybe I just don't use proprietary software enough to realize that. I suppose a big message on the main download page that you don't need to register, would not look professional?
I could add a problem #3, that there still seems to be some rare confusion between my forum (Inkscape Community) and the website. Once in a while Martin forwards me a message where someone is trying to register for the forum on the website. And once in a while, I get a message in the forum from people trying to register on the website. We could solve that by getting the new forum open asap, but I'll be sending a separate message about that shortly.
All best, brynn
-----Original Message----- From: doctormo@...400... Sent: Friday, January 25, 2019 9:07 AM To: inkscape-devel Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Website Confusion
Dear Developers,
This is an interesting brand confusion issue that I want to bring up. Users who visit the Inkscape website exhibit sometimes some key confusions which I'm not entirely sure how to fix:
1. That Inkscape requires them to register for an account in order to download. This is not true, but users have been trained by proprietary service vendors to register accounts for everything to get access. Help requests from users who forget their password or can't activate their accounts indicate that they only wanted to download Inkscape.
2. That the gallery on the website /is inkscape/, this is a much rarer problem. But sometimes people upload things to the Inkscape gallery in order to somehow get the website to perform actions or 'use' Inkscape via a web interface. This is likely because many users are trained to think of apps as websites and the website offers some abilities which could be confused for entry points into Inkscape functionality. This presents as moderation flags, usually people uploading photos and asking why Inkscape can't be accessed.
These are issues that may get worse as more and more people get computers which are not-desktops. Phones, tables, whatever chromebooks are. And I can imagine there might be some simple changes to help direct people more.
Thoughts?
Best Regards, Martin Owens
_______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
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