For software projects, "Download" should directly fetch a usable file
Downloading software is often made more difficult than it should be. A long list of files should not be presented when users expect a download to simply begin. If a list is used, it should be short and the choices clearly differentiated. The download process should favor immediately usable downloads over source code.
Try this: pick a freely available program you use regularly. Head to its website and try to download the current version. What happened?
If you couldn't download the current version from the main page with a single click, the website has failed at one of its fundamental tasks: to deliver the program to the interested user. It's failed by making this simple step needlessly complex. There are a variety of complications out there, ranging from the slight pothole of "which mirror do you want to use?" to the unsightly chasm of "umm, I know you clicked the button for version 2.0, but, uh, here are all the project's files! Enjoy!"
Over the past several years, most software projects have realized that giving you a long list instead of a file is a bad idea. SourceForge, which now hosts over 180,000 open source projects, was an early offender; its default project homepage is confusing and buries the download off the main page in a list of files with icons that never do what I think they should. But, a quick survey of some projects hosted by SourceForge shows that most successful projects have worked around it. Some projects, like Growl, a notification system for Macs, make downloading even easier by providing a large button dominating their front page.
But others somehow continue to needlessly complicate downloading their software. PHP continues to make you select a mirror in a less than intuitive fashion on a page two clicks away from the main page. You still have one more click to go to start your download - once you figure out where to click. (And you can only download source code unless you want the Windows version!)
It gets worse, though. Joomla (whose name officially ends in an exclamation point), a content management system I learned of recently, was a pain to set up (thank you, dependencies). But before I could worry about setup, I had to download the darned thing. Clicking on the big download link near the top of the page takes you to a big, confusing list of files for several different versions and flavors, each available as three different kinds of archives. If you scroll down and click on "download" in the version 1.5 box off on the side, you get…the first half of the big confusing page, which is slightly less big and still confusing. For another example, see the Apache project; I don't think I need to say any more about that mess.
Users should demand, and designers should supply:
Notes
SourceForge Projects Surveyed
The projects I checked on SourceForge were:
Exclamation Points in Names Are Bad
I know it's officially named "Joomla!". I also know that a name with an exclamation point looked ugly in text when Yahoo did it and still looks ugly today. Question marks would also be bad, but for some reason no-one wants to name their product something like "Whizbang?" or "SuperTorrent?".
Try this: pick a freely available program you use regularly. Head to its website and try to download the current version. What happened?
If you couldn't download the current version from the main page with a single click, the website has failed at one of its fundamental tasks: to deliver the program to the interested user. It's failed by making this simple step needlessly complex. There are a variety of complications out there, ranging from the slight pothole of "which mirror do you want to use?" to the unsightly chasm of "umm, I know you clicked the button for version 2.0, but, uh, here are all the project's files! Enjoy!"
Over the past several years, most software projects have realized that giving you a long list instead of a file is a bad idea. SourceForge, which now hosts over 180,000 open source projects, was an early offender; its default project homepage is confusing and buries the download off the main page in a list of files with icons that never do what I think they should. But, a quick survey of some projects hosted by SourceForge shows that most successful projects have worked around it. Some projects, like Growl, a notification system for Macs, make downloading even easier by providing a large button dominating their front page.
But others somehow continue to needlessly complicate downloading their software. PHP continues to make you select a mirror in a less than intuitive fashion on a page two clicks away from the main page. You still have one more click to go to start your download - once you figure out where to click. (And you can only download source code unless you want the Windows version!)
It gets worse, though. Joomla (whose name officially ends in an exclamation point), a content management system I learned of recently, was a pain to set up (thank you, dependencies). But before I could worry about setup, I had to download the darned thing. Clicking on the big download link near the top of the page takes you to a big, confusing list of files for several different versions and flavors, each available as three different kinds of archives. If you scroll down and click on "download" in the version 1.5 box off on the side, you get…the first half of the big confusing page, which is slightly less big and still confusing. For another example, see the Apache project; I don't think I need to say any more about that mess.
Users should demand, and designers should supply:
- A single, large download button that starts a file download immediately if at all possible. Growl does this well, though you'll have to click to About to figure out what the program does.
Multiplatform support provides no excuse for a hard to navigate download process. The Mono project's download page is a great example of providing multiple download options without causing confusion. The downloads are segregated by platform; each platform is identified by name and symbol and clearly distinguished from the others. - Directly usable downloads. The Mono project's download page also gets this right: source code is available, but the page focuses on making it easy to download something that will work out of the box.
- No separate page purely to begin the download. This is unsightly, confusing, and likely most commonly encountered when downloading something from SourceForge. There, the download page looks nothing like the project page that linked to it, and the fact that the page tells you to click something if the download can fail to start must make you wonder why they don't simply link directly to the file. If they want to automatically redirect you to a mirror, rewriting the link target on the download page dynamically would be better than bouncing you through another page.
Notes
SourceForge Projects Surveyed
The projects I checked on SourceForge were:
- BibDesk, an excellent bibliography management system for Macs
- Chmox, a good-enough Windows help (extension .chm) file reader for Macs
- Azureus, a BitTorrent client for the Java platform.
Exclamation Points in Names Are Bad
I know it's officially named "Joomla!". I also know that a name with an exclamation point looked ugly in text when Yahoo did it and still looks ugly today. Question marks would also be bad, but for some reason no-one wants to name their product something like "Whizbang?" or "SuperTorrent?".