Simplify information architecture of Inside Gratipay

[rohitpaulk]

Current state:

The Big Picture	How To	Appendices
Welcome to Gratipay	Advocate for users	Application Health
Mission	Behave well	Calendar
Brand Guidelines	Build Gratipay	Chat
Audience	Configure a Bank Account	Colophon
Product Overview	Configure Paypal	Communication Channels
System Architecture	Deal With Bad Behavior	Finances
Source Code	Format Source Code	See Also
	Handle Security Issues	Survey
	Handle Terms Violations	Who Has Access to What
	Label GitHub Issues
	Manage Queues
	Onboard Yourself
	Respond to Haters
	Review Accounts
	Run a Script
	Run MassPay
	Run Payday
	Shuffle Escrow
	Support Users
	Tell People about Gratipay
	Train New Contributors
	Translate Gratipay

To simplify this, I'm thinking of grouping the how-tos into 3 different categories - Development related, Admin related and General.

General Guides	Development Guides	Admin Guides
Advocate for users	Build Gratipay	Configure a Bank Account
Behave Well	Format Source Code	Configure Paypal
Deal with Bad Behaviour	System Architecture	Handle Security Issues
Label GitHub issues	Source Code	Handle Terms Violations
Manage Queues	Run a Script	Review Accounts
Onboard Yourself		Run MassPay
Respond to Haters		Run PayDay
Tell People about Gratipay		Shuffle Escrow
Train New Contributors		Support Users
Translate Gratipay

[chadwhitacre]

Can you stop by IRC? :)

[rohitpaulk]

@whit537 - I wish I could. I left a comment somewhere on Freshdesk that I thought you'd see - ISP problems, so no IRC, SSH etc for about 2 weeks.

[chadwhitacre]

@rohitpaulk Gotcha, did see the comment. Didn't stick that IRC was affected. :-(

See you in a bit! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

To the matter at hand: I agree that the Howto section is starting to get unwieldy. I suggest that we list only six or eight of them on the homepage and link to /howto/ for the rest. Possible ways to decide which we list on the homepage:

1. manual curation
2. popularity (page views?)
3. user-specific favoriting (requires auth infrastructure unless we go with localstorage)

Tagging them is also a fine idea (we could implement (1) with a "featured" tag) but I think fundamentally we want to trim the list on the homepage.

[rohitpaulk]

A thought: The number of articles look like a lot when they're presented all at once to the user. What if we showed an expanded/collapsed view like Twitter does:

[chadwhitacre]

@rohitpaulk That's a possibility, but that requires imposing a strict hierarchy on HOWTO, which I'm not sold on. I envision over time that we'll end up with quite a few HOWTOs. I don't think that imposing a hierarchy on them is the best way to organize them. I think non-hierarchical tagging and search make more sense.

[rohitpaulk]

I think non-hierarchical tagging and search make more sense.

+1 on search. I don't see why a hierarchical organization is bad though. (As long as we have a 'general'/miscellaneous category for stuff that doesn't belong to a specific group)

I see non-hierarchical tagging as something you'd use when you have to curate content generated by users - like Medium does. When we're in charge of content and how we present it, isn't it cleaner if we enforce logical grouping?

I envision over time that we'll end up with quite a few HOWTOs

Definitely. I think that every how-to will fall under one of the following groups:

• Development
• Design
• Finance
• Admin
• General

One more example that might be closer to our use case than twitter's API docs:

@whit537 - Can you think of an example similar to ours in which 'non-hierarchical tagging' works well?

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, I'm fine giving a hierarchical ordering a try. :-)

[rohitpaulk]

Great :)