Comments on: Redesigning the OpenStreetMap Web Site

By: Anders Hovmöller

Anders Hovmöller — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:50:08 +0000

There are a lot of things that can be done to significantly improve the sites appearance to new users without going through the entire thing in a big bang redesign. Lots of small incremental tuneups would accomplish a lot.

The site has fantastic data but fails in impressing people because the default rendering is kinda ugly up close (all buildings are some kind of weird brown-ish thing) and the site itself looks old fashioned design wise. Just brushing up the outwards appearance in small steps would do a lot. The new logo is a big step for example!

By: OpenStreetMap – Where’s the Search? | Spatial Knowledge

OpenStreetMap – Where’s the Search? | Spatial Knowledge — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:43:07 +0000

[...] discovered that users have difficulty locating the Search on openstreetmap.org. This has been highlighted before. This video shows the gaze plot of one participant looking for the OSM search. The [...]

By: OSM – Zeit für ein Redesign « Nestoria Deutschland Blog

OSM – Zeit für ein Redesign « Nestoria Deutschland Blog — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:00:35 +0000

[...] Diskussion ist jedenfalls im Gange und ich hoffe, dass OSM bald ein neues und frischeres Design bekommt. Jetzt wo OSM [...]

By: Andrew Zaborowski

Andrew Zaborowski — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:20:11 +0000

The http://www.openstreetmap.pl (open in firefox) is an example of a three panel design, I don’t suggest this design be used on the osm.org front page but some ideas could be borrowed. The bottom panel by default shows something along the lines of bestofosm.org (as links), they should probably be customised basen on geoip.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:13:52 +0000

There’s no time limit at the moment, but it does expire if you close your browser.

We want to fix that – there’s an open trac ticket for it – but the person that tried ran into some technical problems or something so it hasn’t been done yet.

By: Matt Williams

Matt Williams — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:06:16 +0000

“One issue here is that there are essentially two entirely separate classes of user that the home page needs to address – newcomers who need to be introduced to the project, and existing users who quite likely just want to see the map.”

The solution I see for this is to extend the duration that a user stays logged in (a cookie I guess) to ~30 days since at the moment I seem to need to re-login to the site every time I visit it (unless of course, this is just a browser issue on my end). Once this is more persistent, it would be possible to simply show a different front page for those users who are logged in and those who are new to the site. This is what gitorious.org does and it allows a fancy front page for newcomers but with a functional page for members.

By: Leif

Leif — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:10:09 +0000

“A routing engine – not because we want to be a full service end user map site…”

As a fairly new OSM contributer I feel this issue of being a ‘full service end user map site’ is the make or break point. Personally I think new users would be more compelled to make better maps if they could see how it directly benefits them, which is…using the maps.

Posed differently…would wikipedia be what it is today if users could contribute to articles but then browsing the data was limited in functionality and left up to third party sites to implement?