The new Ubuntu 8.10 release is out. It was geared to be the smoothest release I’ve done yet but at the last minute an emergency popped up – the animations for the homepage didn’t work properly in Firefox! Fortunately, a very helpful community member, Emilio Lopez, a student from Argentina, stepped in to help. For the record, he found that jquery’s default frame rate which is 1000/13 (about 76fps) was the culprit and lowering it to 1000/100 (10 fps) made our animations very smooth, even in firefox.

But the most interesting part of this release to me is the launch of the new download page. A lot of thought was put into it and we incorporated feedback from several sources, including some students doing user testing for their university classes. Here’s what we changed and why:

When I first started at Canonical my main task was to emphasize downloading Ubuntu. At that time a high percentage of users were using shipit which for many was not the best option because it meant a delay of many weeks. Also the cost of sending CDs is quite high. Therefore we wanted to ensure that everyone who could download the cd image was choosing that option by default. (of course Canonical is happy to send CDs via shipit to those who will not get a satisfactory download experience – that service is there for a reason)

The old page:

I’ve been trying to improve it ever since. This time around, we got feedback that some users were surprised that when they downloaded the installation file that they couldn’t just run it like other installation files they downloaded for Windows. To install Ubuntu you currently need to burn the disk image to a CD and boot off of it. Therefore we changed the heading to clearly communicate that you’re downloading a CD. We also listed a summary of the system requirements that tell you a blank cd and a burner is required.

We heard from the students doing usability testing that some people were downloading server because they thought it was the more powerful version of Ubuntu. If you’ve used Ubuntu server you’ll know that these users would be seriously disappointed. So we killed two birds with one stone by creating a tabbed interface that shows a visual representation of the desktop and server release. The desktop tab shows a laptop running Ubuntu desktop and the server tab shows a stack of servers and a console window.

By using tabs we help users visualize what they’ll be getting but we also make it appear that there are less options on the page. Before there were four radio buttons, newest-desktop, newest-server, LTS-desktop, LTS-server. Now only two are shown. Hopefully this will make it easier for people to make their decission.

Along those same lines, the architecture choice was moved out of the main form area to below the download button. For most users the standard 32bit installation is perfect. Those needing 64bit almost certainly know it and will be looking specifically for it.

We also removed the alternate installer cd option. This was a contentious decision. In early mockups it was listed in a box similar to the architecture box. Now it’s been moved off to an entirely different page.

That leads me to the final major change. Before there was a generic and overly wordy paragraph at the very bottom of the page telling users about more download options. A single link lead them to a very lengthy page. The lengthy page is still there but it has a table of contents on it now so that users can click a link and jump directly to the place they need to go to get the alternate installer (which is also explained in more detail and includes a screenshot), Bit Torrent and more options.

Looking at the download page you’ll probably notice the giant green download button. Believe it or not, quite a bit of time was spent on this button. We wanted it to be clear and obviously clickable. I think we’ve achieved that.

For the future I’d like to make a few more changes:

Use geoip to make the “choose a location” box unnecessary. Later on in the year or beginning of next I hope to implement this in a testing basis so that an ajax call will locate the nearest/best download location and pre-select that option from the list. Once we’re sure that works nicely we’ll take the next step by hiding the selection box entirely. I can’t wait to get rid of that.

Also, we realized that the selected tab needs to be more obvious. The fact that the we have the words “currently selected” on the tab means we’ve failed. One option was to make the selected tab and form background a light colour – I’m not sure I like that but some experimentation will be needed.

A long term goal is to create an embeddable and translatable version of the download form so that official local ubuntu websites can embed the download page into their own site using an iframe, similar to the way kubuntu’s download page works. This is a long-term goal, don’t get too excited about it just yet.

Oh, here’s an interesting little bit of information: If you look at the source of the download page you’ll see that a lot of javascript was used to make it work. You might think then that javascript is required. Nope. This page works in lynx and other non-javascript browsers just fine. The form is re-organized using javascript to make the tabs appear and the options to re-arrange themselves appropriately. If you do not have javascript you’ll see four options all together (server-lts, server-newest, desktop-lts and desktop-newest).

I’d love to hear your feedback. Leave a comment here or consider the Ubuntu Web Presence Team if you’re passionate about this kind of stuff and want to help out.