Welcome to the NASA.gov Forum
“We’re starting on the next go-round of what NASA.gov looks like and want to know what you think. The digital universe has changed radically since we overhauled www.NASA.gov in 2007. Everyone’s use of social media and smartphones has exploded. Visits to NASA’s web sites dropped for a couple of years, then set records in 2011 and this year. How are you making sense of all this? How do you think we here can apply what you’ve learned? Do you like something you’ve seen? Is something missing? How do you interact with NASA online? Where else do you get your NASA news from? We’ve opened this forum to take your feedback. You can offer ideas of your own or comment and vote on others’ suggestions. The forum will be open for new ideas until Dec. 19. We’ll consider all the suggestions and do some prototyping, then see what you think.”
– NASA Claim About MSL Internet Effects Called Into Question – By NASA, previous post
– Why does NASA need multiple websites for the same mission?, previous post
– NASA’s Tangled Human Spaceflight Web Presence, previous post
– NASA’s Baffling, Redirecting Links, previous post
– NASA’s Inability To Speak With One Voice Online, previous post
On the web site set up for this someone has already made the suggestion to “improve navigation and search“. I think this is an important issue and doing it first would be a big help while they are implementing other changes.
Specifically, all of the site searches I’ve tried to use, at http://www.NASA.gov and everywhere else, basically return sites/pages that have ANY of the words in your search string. Even Google! doesn’t work properly; they all just ignore any advanced syntax in your search string. On a site as large and as convoluted as http://www.NASA.gov we need a properly working advanced search that does exactly what the syntax is supposed to do. As is its now, almost all search strings return thousands of sites/pages, which is useless.
Also, I don’t want a search function that “guesses” and suggests, or at the very least, you should be able to turn off the guessing.
The biggest problem is too many fingers in the pie and the right hand does not know what the left hand does and vice-versa.
Where to start…
NASA’s website is pretty good truth be told… leaps and bounds beyond what it was just a few years ago. It’s social media integration is great. Nasaimages.org solved one of the greatest problems NASA had, which is no one-stop-shop for NASA content. But integration with it needs to be complete. If there is an image of anything worth looking at, it needs to be pulled from that hub and tagged to everything relevant.
The most important thing NASA can do is sell its priorities and cut the fat. It doesn’t do that right now. Let’s look at its front page.
Messages and Blogs from Bolden and Garver? Interesting to us. Joe citizen won’t actually care. Why are these on the front page.
NASA Kids Club? Resources for “Students and Educators”? I didn’t care about these when i was a “kid” on an older internet. I sincerely doubt kids care about them now. I’d love to see the analytics of these subsections…
Women at NASA? I mean getting more Women into science is an important meta-goal (and having been in a CS class 73% male, I’ve lived the problem) and this has an important purpose. But maybe on an “outreach page” with anything for Students and Educators.
The NASA homepage needs to be about “the sale”. It needs to be about Flagship missions, the big deals, the marquee items. Everything on it is a blockbuster and everything is widescreen and exciting. Cute junk nobody actually cares about (looking at you Legos on the Space Station) shouldn’t ever be there.
What should be on it?
Curiosity, plastered left to right. Every gripping detail. Every angle of it, accessible in two clicks or less.
The JWST. As odious as it is, if we’re gonna spend money on it, we better gorge ourselves on it.
The SLS. NASA.com should be a virtual log of it and Orion’s progress. Every little bit of progress put in everyman speak. Lots of pictures. Make it look like progress every week towards the ultimate goal. And when Astronauts actually fly in the thing? No more anonymous “Astronauts as your teacher and next door neighbor” stuff. Biggest mistake NASA ever made was trying to make spaceflight routine and its not yelling to high heaven about it’s impressive classes of Astronauts, thus leaving the agency without high-profile Shuttle-era square-jawed champions. Orion is a chance to get it right. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo featured Real American Heroes reprocessed to turn them into American legends. Orion should too, and NASA.gov should play its role.
Every NASA mission to BEO should be the biggest story of the year and the people going on such mission be “the Avengers” come to life. NASA.gov plays perhaps a uniquely critical role in that considering how news and media is consumed today.
Simply as a scientist, I know science isn’t for everyone. Put that elsewhere. Let NASA.gov be pure sensory candy… intellectual junk food. It needs to scream at the top of its lungs: what we do is incredibly hard, incredibly dangerous, incredibly exciting and by the way, the people doing it are living icons.
Talk about martian geology and fun with microgravity somewhere else.
Jonathan,
On first reading, I agreed with some of your ideas, but not all of them. When I asked myself why I didn’t agree with some of them, it occurred to me that I think we were both doing the same thing — saying that the main page should contain those things that you/I find most important. And on further reflection, I had to admit that I was really looking for the things that I personally find most interesting, as opposed to what’s important.
I think maybe we need to revisit the question of what should be on the main page starting with the question, what are the purposes of a site’s main page? One thing I think is clear — whatever anyone personally finds important and/or interesting, we should be able to get to a main entry point for it with one, at most two clicks from the main page (which traditionally is done with cascading menus, as opposed to NASA’s single tier menu), yes/No?
Also, one tough job that I don’t think NASA (or most other sites) does well is getting people to view things on the site that they’re not familiar with. At http://www.NASA.gov I sometimes by accident come across something I find real interesting but had never heard about before, and when I look at the date I find it’s maybe two or more years old. It might be useful to have a “New Things” link on the main page to a page listing new things links with brief descriptions, and when new things are cycled off that page they would then be indexed into a master table of contents for quick access to any topic, Yes/No?
The other thing I noticed about the NASA main page is that much of the real estate is divided by media type, which, to my mind, serves no purpose (except perhaps to try to look flashy). I think it would be more useful sorted by topic, or division, or location, or something other than media type. Just my ideas.
So, what are the purposes of a site’s main page?
Steve
Static sites are outdated and are rapidly becoming obsolete. Why doesn’t NASA have a social site? Where can I set up a profile and join groups to discuss various NASA-related topics with other NASA employees? Facebook sites are scattered and really just too “public” for any interesting discussions.
NCM,
That raises an important point; the site has to be functional for both NASA employees and for the rest of us, which I would think is two separate sets of requirements (and where do NASA contractors fit in?).
Should there be two separate sites which point to a lot of common content, or should it be one common site with certain functions requiring an employee log in to access?
It seems to me that this question is one of those “should have been asked first” requirements.
Steve