Is your web site making assumptions about your users?

I’m doing a little research for a project I’m working on for someone. Part of that project involves getting users up and running with Eclipse, and one of the things I wanted to document were a couple of fairly simple (or so I thought) questions:

“What is Eclipse?”

“What is an IDE?”

So I figured I’d go to the source — the eclipse home page — and see how they answer those questions, then crib off of it.

Well, as far as I can tell, they really don’t.

On the eclipse front page it says:

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. (We started with the best Java IDE ever and we’ve grown from there.)

But that really doesn’t say much of anything. It looks like it got run over by a runaway marketing focus group or something… If someone asked me how they could become a more productive programmer, and I said “go check out eclipse” without any real background in eclipse, actually getting started based on this site would be really tough.

And good luck finding ANY place on the site that actually defines IDE (integrated development environment). This site could really use a quick “elevator pitch” and a one page executive summary, as well as some basic definitions for newbies.

To me, it’s a very classic and easy trap to fall into — the people maintaining a site are so familiar with the material they forget that a part of their audience is new to it all and doesn’t have any context. This does NOT mean you need to “dumb down” your site to the lowest common denominator, but you should always design a site to include some kind of launch pad for someone completely new to whatever you’re doing – one of your user profiles should have literally stepped off of a boat after having been marooned on a remote island for a decade. “New to Eclipse? Start here!” page for people who will otherwise find the rest of the site somewhere between opaque and incomprehensible for all of the jargon. We tried to mitigate that with our “get started” page in the rewrite we did of the OpenLaszlo site recently, and it’s been pretty well received (but it can be better, and we’re looking at it).

One other thing the Eclipse site does that bothers me: as you navigate through the site, the “HOME” button in the nav menu changes meaning. It’s always called home, but if you navigate to a wiki page, HOME turns into the home of the wiki site, or if you go to the demo site, it returns you to the home page of that site, not of the eclipse site in general. There’s a second home button on the bottom page nav bar, also called HOME, but that home button takes you back to www.eclipse.org.

Having two buttons named the same but doing different things, with one of them changing based on things that aren’t communicated (there’s no visual change to identify main site pages from wiki pages from whatever pages) just seems like bad navigation. I realize what they’re trying for, but it doesn’t work for me. That, of course, and $5.00 buys you a latte at Starbucks…

The main point here is this: is your site making assumptions that are going to trip up someone new to the site? If so, how is that going to affect them being willing to adopt in or use whatever it is you’re presenting? And how do you plan to fix it?

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