So i recently heard from a friend about Utopian and the awesome stuffs they're doing in the open source community. He sent me the Utopian website url and I was amazed by the first thing I saw, which was the black wobbling banner(that's how best I can describe it).
I soon understood what Utopian was all about after reading down the next two sections.
...and then I saw "Choose a project"
Underneath that I saw what looked like a slider of contributions people had made to the respective different open source projects listed above.
And of course, some titles caught my attention. I wanted to see what the full detail of the contribution made by whoever was the owner of the excerpts of those posts and as every normal user would do, I clicked!
Suprisingly, I found myself back at utopian.io and I assumed I clicked a wrong link or something. I went ahead to click it a second time and still I was back at [utopian.io]http://utopian.io).
As an innocent user who was still finding hard to comprehend why a link to a supposed post is redirecting back to the homepage, I presumed it was just a slight error on the part of the developer and that it was specific to just that post.
I went ahead to click another post and still the same thing! I went through almost every post link until it dawned on me that they were all dead links!!
test on mozilla firefox browser
It was quite shocking to realise this seeing that they were pretty much no other link on the site. For a me, as a first timer on the utopian site who was eager to share my contributions on this awesome platform, I was confused and frustrated at what to do. After a few minutes of rigmaroling the website hoping to get a magical redirect to somewhere useful, it finally hit me that the answer was in the big black wobble! I then navigated my way back to the top and clicked on the signup button. Only then was I able to enter through the gates of heaven!
However, not everyone could be as patient and smart as I was to realise the only option to select was either "signup" or "login". Most Users who visit that site for the first time would end up closing the tab the instant they became lost. This isn't a very good pointer for the utopian community as that may drive away supposedly interested users who want to make an impact in the open source community.
Although I later realised that the reason I couldnt view the posts was because I wasn't signed in, the essence of showcasing those excerpts on the homepage is useless if guest users cannot view them. There should at least be a flash notification to tell the user that he is unable to view it because he isn't signed in. This will highly improve the user experience (UX) of the site and prevent future dilemmas.
Or better still, the links should be removed entirely so the users just knows upfront that he can't view those posts.
Another bonus observation(which should actually fall under suggestions): Like I earlier mentioned, the only two valid links for a guest user is the "sign up" and "login" buttons. These should be added to the sticky nav header so its always visible to the user.
Overall, the Utopian platform is extremely awesome!
Great design and user interface!!
Kudos to the developers!
