JungleDragon Alpha revision 3 is deployed as of now at http://staging.jungledragon.com

Where revision 1 and 2 fixed and improved dozens of things reported by testers, this release does one thing only: it repurposes the homepage, the entry point of JungleDragon. Here is a somewhat outdated screenshot of the previous homepage (click to enlarge):

Many of you recognize this style of homepage from sites like Digg.com, and the many sites that follow this popular pattern. It shows a stream of content on which users can vote. The content is described using a title, a truncated description and other metadata such as the submitter of the post. Finally, there is the possibility to directly vote on an entry.

I've come to realize that such a design does not make sense for a photo site like JungleDragon:

• It takes up a lot of vertical space, which means scrolling. This does not match the common audience of JungleDragon who just want to view photos.
• The extra metadata of a photo takes up a lot of space, much more than the actual thumbnail itself. Although the metadata can be interesting, it should not dominate the layout so much. Not on the homepage.
• Allowing for direct voting based on thumbnails allows for fairly superficial voting. It may increase the quantity of votes, but not the quality. If a user is lured into a thumb, I imagine they click on it to see the full size. From there, they can vote on it if they want to.

In an act of simplicity, the redesigned homepage now looks like this (click to enlarge):

Much cleaner and simpler eh? A strong emphasis on the photos and much less scrolling. The top image is still large and then followed by a grid of images. The number of rows in the grid depend on your reputation. It starts with 5 rows and could grow to 11 rows based on your class in the food chain. Note thatthe screenshot still shows 3 rows.

The image metadata is not completely gone; upon hovering a thumbnail, a quick inline box shows basic information:

The new homepage: less nonsense, more photo viewing. Agree?

Watch it live at http://staging.jungledragon.com

RATE THIS CONTENT (OPTIONAL)

	Was this document useful to you?
	Rating:	Awesome  Good  Average  Poor  Useless

CREATE A NEW COMMENT

	Name:
	Email:
	Website:
	Content:	HTML is not allowed. Hyperlinks will automatically be converted.