Suggestion: Make Download Page More User Friendly for Non-Technical People
Posted: 19 Nov 2020, 13:33
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.
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.