The website of the Brazilian OpenOffice.org community was a major hub for free software activism in Brazil. As a case-study for my masters, I helped the community redesigning their website through experimental participatory design techniques. The community was dispersed across the country in a way that face-to-face workshops would be impossible. I had to develop techniques that would work through their communication channels: email lists, IRC channels, instant messaging, and websites.
We came up with an online version of FIDO for the homepage content. The participants would drag-and-drop the components to arrange in the homepage.
In total, 130 people responded to the “wireframe-sorting” exercise. Later, we had to compile a homepage that would take into account the most common relationships made by participants.
The wireframe proposed.
And the final layout.
