Suggestion: Make Download Page More User Friendly for Non-Technical People

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bromley
Posts: 5
Joined: 19 Nov 2020, 12:53

Suggestion: Make Download Page More User Friendly for Non-Technical People

Post by bromley »

My company provides a JNLP app for non-technical people. They are very competent in their fields, but they are not software developers like us. Most have no idea what JNLP is, most don't know what a JVM is, many get confused by zip files, some don't know whether their version of Windows is 64-bit or 32-bit. They still manage to use our software though, provided we make it easy for them to install.

https://java.com/ is far from great now because it will only provide Java 1.8, for personal use only. But it does make the download experience good and straightforward for non-technical people. Or at least it did before it added all the warnings about the licence update. We were very happy sending our non-technical users there, and they never had problems installing Java.

Your download page at https://openwebstart.com/download/ is absolutely fine for a software developer like me, but I'm pretty sure that if I sent our non-technical users to it, a significant proportion would turn back and give up on our JNLP app. And that's despite your download page already being a lot more user friendly than many software download pages.

Some specific suggestions:

1. You could provide the Windows EXE downloads directly, rather than wrapping them in zip files. The EXEs are virtually the same size as the zips anyway, so wrapping them in zips makes very little difference to the file size, but the zips will confuse non-technical people. Even a developer like me sees a zip and thinks "uh oh, I'm going to have to figure out what folder to unzip it into and probably set a path or something", when actually the EXE installer is nice and straightforward, once you get it out of the zip. I think it would be a lot more user-friendly if it were just an EXE (with no zip).

2. The talk about system requirements and the paragraph saying that "memory and hard-drive space consumption are mainly influenced by the number of JVMs downloaded and the JNLP applications installed and cached on your system" will confuse non-technical people too. It could go below the downloads links, or on a separate page on system requirements or similar.

3. At the top of the page, you could do something like what java.com does and use JavaScript to detect which download is likely to be right for the visitor, and give them a big download button for that specifically. So a visitor with 64-bit Windows would see a big download button for the latest version of the 64-bit Windows EXE file. Then the full list of download options could go further below.

4. Not yet sure if this is possible, but if Open Web Start could be detected with JavaScript, we could make our download page (for our JNLP file) more user friendly, by detecting whether visitors have Open Web Start installed already (so we know whether we need to send them to your download page to download and install Open Web Start before they'll be able to click and run our JNLP file). That would be great.

We would be more than happy to contribute something financially to making your download page more user friendly, if it would help. It would make a big difference to us and other organizations trying to provide a JNLP app that is straightforward and user friendly to install. Please email me if interested.

bromley
Posts: 5
Joined: 19 Nov 2020, 12:53

Re: Suggestion: Make Download Page More User Friendly for Non-Technical People

Post by bromley »

A short update:

I can see now that my suggestion 4 above wouldn't be possible. But to improve usability for our users we decided to host the unzipped Win64 and Mac downloads ourselves, and use JavaScript to detect which download link to show people. Hardly anyone uses Win32 any more at all, and Linux isn't used much by our users, so we don't worry about those two. If we can't detect Win64 or Mac, we link to your download page.

For anyone else looking to do similar, we check navigator.platform and navigator.userAgent. If navigator.platform starts with "Win", and navigator.userAgent contains either "Win64" or "WOW64", we assume Windows 64. If navigator.platform starts with "Mac" we assume Mac.

We really appreciate this software being available, thank you!

Dirk Kress
Posts: 1
Joined: 08 Apr 2020, 09:44

Re: Suggestion: Make Download Page More User Friendly for Non-Technical People

Post by Dirk Kress »

Thank you for your suggestions and sorry for the late reply. I will try to answer your proposals In regards of the website.

I totally understand your thoughts but we mainly aim at visitors with technical understanding and experience. Mentioning the system requirements above the download links has not been an issue until now. The same applies to the question which version to download. Detecting the OS with JS is of course possible but would mean additional efforts with only limited impact / overall advantages.

Long story short: If there are similar requests in the future, we will definitely re-consider your proposals. But for the time being we would like to avoid this.

bromley
Posts: 5
Joined: 19 Nov 2020, 12:53

Re: Suggestion: Make Download Page More User Friendly for Non-Technical People

Post by bromley »

Thanks for replying Dirk! I understand completely that this stuff wouldn't be worth the effort since you mainly aim at technical visitors. For people like me your download page is just fine.

Hosting the latest Win64 and Mac downloads ourselves is working well for us now, as we can auto-detect which file to give people using JavaScript, give the Windows EXE file unzipped, and provide installation instructions for the Mac DMG file.

That last one is a good example of how non-technical users are full of surprises... Someone from a big company was trying to install our software on a Mac. Our instructions said to download and install your DMG file which we provided them, and then open our JNLP file to run our software... The user said they had installed OpenWebStart but they were getting an error message when trying to open the JNLP file. We don't use Macs here but we rented one that we could remote into and eventually figured out that the user had never actually installed OpenWebStart. They'd downloaded it, and opened it to the point where they saw the logo and a big button saying "OpenWebStart Installer", but they never realized they had to double-click that big button. So they thought they had installed it when they hadn't.

Zip files are similarly confusing to non-technical Windows users, who are also full of surprises :D

But like I say I do understand that these sorts of usability issues probably aren't worth the time unless you want OpenWebStart to become more accessible to a wider less-technical audience than the one it is currently aimed at. Thanks again for hearing me out and for the great software :)

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