I just went to the Mozilla.org home page to see what was new. I think it’s time for a serious web site make-over.

Here’s a list of what I would consider changing about the Mozilla home page to make it more approachable and user friendly:

• It’s not hard to find the “free download” area on the front page if you’re trained that a bright green area is a good area to look at first on a web page.
• Text and link clutter. There are a lot of links and text on this page. The most common reason for someone coming to this page is to download Firefox. It’s prominent, but it could be made even more obvious by (re)moving the unnecessary text and user quotes from this page entirely.
• There is no obvious explanation of what Firefox is, other than it was recently patched and made more stable. Is that the first thing you really want people to read about your product? (Again, other than in the unnecessary quote from some journalist, it’s not obvious that it is a web browser at all).
• Inconsistent images. A screen shot with the Thunderbird icon, the firefox icon with some “beta” text and a large titled screenshot of Firefox in use, currently showing NASA!
• The big green down arrow — of course the universal symbol for download!
• An unusually cluttery use of small tear-off “calendar pages” for news and announcements. They draw the eye too much and offer little in the way of useful information. The announcement should be the headline, not the date.
• Inconsistent linking … the links along the bottom aren’t underlined, yet all others seem to be.
• “Get” this “Get” that, yet, not “Get” everything.
• Some of the downloads are “Free”, yet others aren’t?
• Disconnected tab bar (Products, Support, etc.). There’s no “home”, the tabs go “white” when selected, but when the user is at the home page, none of the tabs are active.
• Always consider the marketing speak you’re using. I clicked on the Products tab to check out the tab behavior and noticed the use of  “next generation” twice (even once is often too much.) But to claim that both Firefox and Thunderbird are the “next generation” browsers and e-mail clients respectively is quite the ego trip. It’s a web browser folks. It happens to do CSS better than IE and has tabs. Thunderbird …, it’s an average e-mail client. Nothing special. Neither are revolutionary. They are evolutionary. Nothing new was invented. Something old was improved and other things copied.

What else might you change?

I’ve listed the ideas above to help others consider how to evaluate their own web sites and software applications. Of course it always helps to have a critical eye, but thinking about being a user advocate more can often go a long way. “Be a user.”