MDN/Archives/Development/Redesign/Testing

MDN is undergoing a major redesign with improved design, layout, page customization options and navigation. To ensure that the redesign is the best it can be, we have made the design available to anyone who would like to help with beta testing.

How you can help

Remember that even though you will see our new design, you will be working with the same documentation. Any changes you make will be seen by all users, whether they are seeing the new design or not.

Once the redesign is enabled, we would love you to go around the site and have a look at everything, as well as editing some pages and making some other site contributions. Please let us what you think of the redesign, what is not working, and what could use improvement.

Testing suggestions

Looking for some ideas? Try testing out the following. Bug reports, change requests and other feedback is welcome.

• Read documentation and follow links. Pay attention to code samples, images and videos. Act just as you normally would if you were reading documentation.
• Try our improved search. Pay attention to both the experience of searching and the quality of the search results.
• Edit a page (remember that your edits will be seen by everyone, whether they are testing the beta or not)
• Edit a template, if your account has this privilege (again, remember that these edits will be seen by everyone)

Sharing feedback

Let us know what you think! Bug reports, change requests and general feedback are all welcome. There are many ways to get in touch with us.

• Before anything else, please file a bug. We would love to hear from you on IRC and through our mailing lists, but if a bug is not already filed we will probably ask you to do so. Remember to use this form for all redesign feedback, as it will group feedback appropriately and ensure that the team sees it.
• Join the conversation in IRC. You can meet us in #mdn for general discussion, #devmo for discussion about documentation and #mdndev for discussion about development progress.
• Join our mailing lists. Staff documentation writers can be reached on dev-mdc@mozilla.org and platform developers can be reached on dev-mdn@mozilla.org.

What kind of feedback we are looking for? We are interested in:

• Your overall feeling: keep in mind it is an early beta and is a work in progress. It isn't a beta, we won't change anything until the launch.
• Navigational problems: the first goal is to be able to reach all the information. We know that it was difficult with the old design, we hope it is better, but we may forgotten something.
• Visual problems and glitches:
  • on the home page: Does the positioning of the element suit your needs? Some elements are emphasized by the color scheme or the position on the page: are these the right ones?
  • on the zone landing pages
  • in articles: we have in-content element that may not fit well, we are interested in a list. Especially if you use a lesser known part of the MDN that is not the Open Web document where we probably have missed it. We have added quick links, but these are experimental: feel free to tell us if they help you or not.
  • at different sizes. Keep in mind that even if we aim to support small screens, we are not done there yet. But anything 10" or greater shouldn't show major problem.
• Speed: we don't have performed any specific optimization here, but there shouldn't be less good now than before. If you noticed strange things, be sure to tell us.
• Search: we have a new search engine, that does not use Google anymore, so we are specifically interested in the quality of the results. We have added the ability to set filters. Try using them, tell us if they work, if the quality of results is good and so on. Also is it easy to get to the search? Is there specific problems you encounter when typing your search query?

Final word

Really don't hesitate to give us information. The more feedback of good quality we get the more we will be able to consider in the next cycle beginning now.

Try to be precise and specific, it helps us. If you are using bugzilla, one problem per bug please, if you are using dev-mdc, you can of course put several points in your e-mail. But try to use different paragraphs, maybe numbered, so that it can be more easily referenced and evaluated.

We are very excited with this redesign and we want to improve it a lot in the next few months: your feedback is a very important element in achieving this.

The whole MDN team thank you in advance! And let's test!

Notes and information

New features — look out for them:

• The main difference you'll notice is that the new theme. It is aimed at being more easily red and to look more professional. Among the differences you'll notice:
  • The consistent usage of the same font (Open Sans) instead of the mix of fonts we had before. Only code, and therefore interfaces, methods, and properties, are using a fixed-width font.
  • Numerous pages have now a quick links columns aimed at simplifying the navigation.
• Certain pages have been converted into Zones, which are basically landing pages for specific focus topics like projects or tasks (Firefox, Firefox OS, Building Apps.) These have a distinct look and feel, and an integrated zone menu that persists between all the pages that under the zone in the document hierarchy. Examples:
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps
• We have a new internal search engine:
  • It should be more precise than the previous one.
  • It allows to filter the search on specific subject.