The intention of this article is to discover and examine the problems creativecommons.org has with regards to user experience, accessibility, ease of use, content, etc. Constructive thoughts about how you feel the site currently looks and works, and how you believe it could be improved.

Site Architecture and Design

• What is CC; Why is it compelling?
• How can I use/understand CC easily and efficiently?
• Remove the blog from the front page of the site and replace it with a concise summary of CC and a handful of highly relevant links to other parts of the site. I seriously doubt whether many people go to CC.org simply to read the blog, and those that do will have no problem clicking on a new tab that says "Weblog." Most people interested in the CC blog are probably somewhat technical and will most likely be using a feed aggregator of some sort. Rename "Jurisdiction News" to something like "Latest News" and incorporate items from the CC blog into the list, then move the list into the right column where there is presently nothing but whitespace, thereby leaving more room for relevant content in the main content area.
• The "Support" tab has an unfortunate name. When I'm at a website and I see a link to "Support" the first thing I think about is "Technical Support" or Help, not a place where I can donate money or buy things. It could perhaps be made more clear with something like "Support CC" or "Donate" or anything that disambiguates it from the normal "help me" meaning on the web.
• The "Participate" tab should be renamed to something like "Wiki" or "CC Wiki" so that it's clear that CC has a wiki. My mind makes no natural connection between the word "participate" and a wiki. People, even non-technical ones, know about wikis these days, and to make it clearer on the front page that we have one might increase the traffic to it.
• Suggestion to make front page 'stupidly simple'
  • Two LARGE (150x150px) green buttons on dark background
    • LEARN MORE (about, blog, etc, similar to what we have)
    • LICENSE YOUR WORK (license chooser with no other information)
  • No text, no other information Fred Benenson 15:00, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Information and Content

• Overview
  • An average, non-technical, person should be able to come to CC.ORG, and very quickly find out the basics of what CC provides and how it can help him. As it stands, a first time visitor has a hard time digging into the dense information currently provided.

• Ideally, less words up front.
  • People new to CC would probably prefer bite sized introductions, and pictures — compelling hooks to allow them to learn and, hopefully, disseminate to friends, colleagues, students. Long articles describing what CC is, and what the licenses are, etc. are great for those who already know about CC.

• Videos easy to find

Specific pages needing overhaul

Near duplicate content

Please list highly redundant pages so we can decide which to merge and which to more highly focus:

• http://creativecommons.org/presskit now includes not just graphics, approximately same information as http://creativecommons.org/about (one click away for latter)
• http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses / http://creativecommons.org/about/license/

Wiki Main Page

• http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Main_Page -- way too much text and way too much info to take in; could definitely be streamlined so that pertinent info is easy to find right away

/about

• The About page is currently a compendium of links to many things that having nothing to do with CC as an organization. To me, the About page should have nothing more than a synopsis of the organization, the history and perhaps a link to the People/Staff page.

/contact

• There should be a listing of the FFAQ questions above the contact form, which links to the answers on the FFAQ wiki page. Right now there is a bit of text suggesting that someone take a look at the FAQ, but clearly few people do. The vast majority of info@ emails could be headed off if people were to actually read the FFAQ, so actually having some text like "Is your question like one of these: <iteration of FFAQ questions>?" above the contact form might preemptively answer many people's questions, and lighten the load to info@.

Theme and Layout

• ...

License Chooser

• Updated results page
• There is a fairly urgent need to reword the descriptive text to clarify unambiguously and in no uncertain terms that the chooser is in no way whatsoever a registration form, nor is it creating a unique license of any sort. It's need to explicitly state, and probably in a highlighted fashion, that it is nothing more and nothing less than a helpful tool to help someone select the right type of license, and also useful for generating some good HTML for the purposes of marking a work online. I can't tell you how many info@ emails I get where people think that they are creating a license or registering a work. And if the info@ emails can be taken a somewhat representative sample of the general CC-using public, then there is a huge amount of mis-understanding floating around.

Deeds

• An easier way to quickly attribute a work via the deed.
• ...