tox.chat website redesign

[iphydf]

I'm currently working with a professional designer to rework our website, pretty much from scratch. We will use some of the ideas, and maybe some of the words from the existing website, but other than that, I'd like our designer to not be bound by preexisting content. That said, here is a list of requirements for the design.

Core requirements

• The website should cater to normal users who have no or little experience with computers and just want to have a video call with their friend/daughter/grandson/etc.
• As a result, we want to present the shortest path for them to achieve this goal, with as few choices as possible. Ideally, we can make the choice for them directly (e.g. OS detection).
• The design should be attractive to the age group we're most likely to be used by, i.e. young people.
• The textual content should be clear, and not overloaded with visuals, but visuals are important and should guide the user around the website.

Branding

• The logo stays. This is what people know already, and it's a good logo.
• The name stays (even though someone else owns the trademark - let's just hope we don't get sued by a German screw/plugs/construction materials company).
• Colours of the website can change, but colours of the logo stay.

Derived requirements

Some derived requirements that follow from solving the constraint system above:

• We will have a single client for desktop users and a single client for mobile (Android) users. We will not present the user with a choice of clients. If we can detect the OS, we will present a big download button for that single client to them. If not, we will show a choice of operating systems (not clients).
• We will present that client as the "Tox" client. After downloading, they will still see the client's name, but the website will tell them they are downloading the "Tox" client.

Our choice of client

We will choose a single client to present to users on the website. The choice of client should be:

• Giving new users a good experience (no/few crashes, audio/video working, group chats working, etc.).
• Actively developed, so we can make announcements about its releases on social media and our blog.
• Used by existing users of Tox.

Regarding other clients

Currently, the website fairly prominently lists many clients. Most of them are not actively developed. Some of them are. We can't confuse users with that list, so it has to go. We can have some place to put them, e.g. on the TokTok website, where all the various integrations with toxcore are presented. We can do a better job of presenting them there, but tox.chat is the site that users go to when they don't want a choice.

Some implementation notes

• The website should continue to be accessible by users without JavaScript, but if users have JavaScript enabled, it can make things nicer/faster. NoScript users should still be able to reach all the information easily.
• The website should be fully responsive and be accessible on any screen, font, and dpi settings users may have. It's OK if the first iteration isn't 100% responsive, but it should at least work well on default settings on all widely used devices (iThings, androids, different desktop resolutions).
• i18n is a goal, but not for the first iteration. We should, however, make sure we're not setting ourselves up for making i18n really hard in the future by choices we make now.

Final notes

It is vital we do this now. This, among other things. I've been out for a year, travelling. When the coronavirus started hitting the world, I came back, to get Tox into shape and out into the hands of common people who want to talk to their family abroad or even in the same locked down city. We have the technology, we've been working on it for about 7 years. We should get this technology to the people now. They are suffering, because they use Zoom and get all their data sent over to Beijing (this is true). Let's get our stuff together and present Tox as the awesome product it is.