Rename Operation section to Services

While writing a roadmap for the next 12 months of metrics team work it occurred to us that "Operation" as title might be misunderstood as everything around operating our services. But what we really want to include there are services that we provide that are related to operating the Tor network. It seemed like "Services" might be a better word here, because what we provide there are services.

However, I wonder if "Services" would still fit into the other categories then. We do provide services, but we don't provide development or research but instead information about development and information about research. Ideally, we'd find consistent names for these five or six (including About) categories.

Another concern that just came to mind: if we rename the category, we'll have to rename the web page from /operation.html to /services.html and install redirects. Not impossible, but we should be sure that we want to do it and not undo it shortly after.

iwakeh and irl, what do you think, should we rename it? And what do you think about the concerns above? Should we also ask the UX people? Or should we simply keep this unchanged for the moment?

added component::metrics/website owner::metrics-team priority::medium resolution::implemented severity::normal status::closed type::enhancement ux-team labels

I think the renaming would improve the site. There doesn't need to be a common theme in the sense 'we provide xyz' or similar. It is more important that a first time user can sort of guess what could be behind a link.

Do we really need the redirects? Not that many people might have bookmarked operation.html (during fourteen days of logs there were 34 requests/day for this page on average compared to 594 for userstats-relay-country or 178 for userstats-bridge-country).

I like to maintain redirects for a short time at least, to allow for search engines to update.

I wonder if "Query" is a good name, instead of "Services" as most of the tools listed on the page are for querying databases/datasets. Perhaps "Explore".

I'm thinking more a verb for the user, if that makes sense, than a noun describing what the things are.

Replying to irl:

I like to maintain redirects for a short time at least, to allow for search engines to update.

That's a valid point.

I wonder if "Query" is a good name, instead of "Services" as most of the tools listed on the page are for querying databases/datasets. Perhaps "Explore".

I like 'Explore'! It would read well as title of the current 'Services' page.

I'm thinking more a verb for the user, if that makes sense, than a noun describing what the things are.

It makes sense, but we'd need to give up on having only nouns or only verbs as titles, which is fine with me.

I agree that we should maintain redirects at least for a short time.

I'm not entirely happy with "Query" or "Explore", mainly for the mentioned reason of giving up on having only nouns or only verbs as titles. In fact, we picked nouns because we split the website into subsections to reflect that there are quite diverse user groups coming to us and wanting to learn different things about the Tor network.

A minor concern against "Explore" is that the graphs are another way of exploring the data, and the current Operation page does not include those graphs, and shouldn't include them. "Query" or "Lookup" might work---if we can resolve the issue of picking consistent names for all sections.

I'm not strictly against switching the naming theme. Though I'd want us to take a step back and think about better names for all six sections that follow a common theme (verb or noun).

But maybe we should wait at least two weeks with that until we have seen the work on reorganizing the main Tor website and its subsites for development, research, community, and so on. Maybe that gives us some input or guidelines, or it creates new requirements that we're currently unaware of.

Changing to needs_information for now.

Trac:
Status: new to needs_information

Should we include the UX team in the discussion or ask directly for a statement regarding usability etc.?

Replying to iwakeh:

Should we include the UX team in the discussion or ask directly for a statement regarding usability etc.?

Yes!

But let's do that after Montreal when we also know more about their plans to redesign the main Tor website.

Adding the ux-team keyword after talking to Linda who agreed that this is something where the UX team might help us with.

Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, ux-team added

Hi all,

I agree with Karsten that focusing on the name that is the easiest to understand, rather than a name that it specifically a verb or a noun, will be first thing to do. If there are many good names that are easy to understand, then I think a theme would be more cohesive, and I don't object to it. But I don't think the clarity should be compromised.

To me, "operations"or "services" are both okay, but I'm not feeling strongly one way or the other. Operations makes sense, because metrics uses these to operate. Services make sense too, but for the same reason. Services makes it slightly more like it would allow people to use that service as well, which I think could be a worthwhile thing to do.

"Query" or "explore" seem more confusing to me (query what? explore what?), but it could be less confusing to other people. I slightly prefer operations or services, but this is my personal opinion as Linda who is a regular person with biases, not Linda the UX expert.

Linda the UX expert thinks that:

1. renaming it to something else, given that it is reasonable, seems like a good idea, and you should try it out.
2. if after the change, a lot more people click on the link, yay! it seems to have at least made people want to click on it. But it could be because it looked like new content, not necessarily because the change made it clear and now they need to click on it. If the increased traffic persists over a long period of time, you have something.
3. if after the change, the same/less amount of people click on the link, I don't think this means anything, since the main content of the page is in not the secondary header's items. If there is consistently less traffic over a long period of time, then you have something.

In short, I think that this change is well intentioned, not disruptive, and can't hurt. So I say try it out, see what happens. :)

Replying to linda:

To me, "operations"or "services" are both okay, but I'm not feeling strongly one way or the other. Operations makes sense, because metrics uses these to operate. Services make sense too, but for the same reason. Services makes it slightly more like it would allow people to use that service as well, which I think could be a worthwhile thing to do.

"Operation" has failed to describe what is under that tab here, as it's not things relevant to Metrics operation, but to the operation of the public Tor Network, things relevant to relay operators and those monitoring the health of the network.

"Query" or "explore" seem more confusing to me (query what? explore what?), but it could be less confusing to other people. I slightly prefer operations or services, but this is my personal opinion as Linda who is a regular person with biases, not Linda the UX expert.

I think we do want to make clear that things under that tab are useful to users, not just the metrics team. Beyond this, I've been thinking about swapping out the secondary-nav depending on the section at the top of the page and adding an Analysis section for the things currently on the home page. As we integrate things into the Metrics website, this may make more sense.

Thanks, linda, for your feedback! I agree with your conclusion that we should try renaming to "Services".

irl, let's talk more about your suggestion regarding "swapping out the secondary-nav depending on the section at the top of the page and adding an Analysis section for the things currently on the home page." Do you mean adding "Analysis" as new first category next to "News", with "Users", "Servers", etc. as subitems under "Analysis" and a separate (possibly empty) set of subitems under "News", "Sources", etc.? Happy to talk about that, but let's move to a new ticket, as it's somewhat unrelated to the renaming question here. Note that we'll likely want to talk to a/our web designer and that we might want to wait and see what the main Tor website redesign produces.

So, regarding the renaming question, I suggest that we:

• rename Operations to Services on the website,
• keep the cogs icon,
• move operation.html to services.html, and
• put a manual redirect page on operation.html.

Anything else? Should we do it, like, in the next few days before we put out our roadmap which uses these categories, too?

Yes, essentially that was what I was thinking, I only raised it now as it may have influenced our choice of the new name for Operation.

The changes lgtm. I do think it's a good idea to have the roadmap and the website agree before the roadmap is put out.

iwakeh, what do you think about this plan?

Replying to karsten:

... So, regarding the renaming question, I suggest that we:

• rename Operations to Services on the website,
• keep the cogs icon,
• move operation.html to services.html, and
• put a manual redirect page on operation.html.

All fine in the light of the previous discussions.

Anything else? Should we do it, like, in the next few days before we put out our roadmap which uses these categories, too?

I think that seems to be a sufficient list of to-dos before finalizing the roadmap.

(It seems trac ate my last week's reply ...)

I just renamed "Operation" to "Services" on the website and opened #23973 (moved) for discussing adding a new "Analysis" category. Closing. Thanks, everyone!

Trac:
Status: needs_information to closed
Resolution: N/A to implemented

closed