Refine landing page design

[florent-leborgne]

Creating an issue to track some possible refinements for the docs landing page as I've been reviewing #663:

Left/right margins or horizontal reading width

The page is too wide at the moment, there should probably be a max width that is lower to what it is now

Vertical efficiency

We can optimize the first sections of content so users can scroll less until they get to solution doc links and guides. For example:

• Remove the "free trial" and "Upgrade" buttons in the Elastic Documentation section. The free trial button is unnecessary, the Upgrade one can go next to troubleshooting in the header
• Instead, we could have an "Elastic Search AI Platform overview" button that would allow us to remove the "basics" section, which would move up the Instant Elasticsearch section

Basics

See above
OR
if we want to keep that section, I think it's best to provide only one path (= one tile), to keep the basics basic

Header

The header looks like we're browsing elastic.co for various reasons:

• Elastic logo (+ doesn't even link to elastic.co but to the docs home page)
• "solutions and use cases" -> just lists solutions
• "Work with the Elastic Stack" -> not sure it's very meaningful because of our usage of "Elastic Stack" throughout the docs and our updated versioning
• ^^ both are too long

I'd suggest something like this to make it obvious we're browsing the docs site + tune the wording (and maybe ordering):

Nav, docs scope, and discoverability

This may dismiss the comment and suggestion in the Header section and be beyond the scope of just the landing page, but I found it much easier to browse/discover/grasp the scope of the docs with only one big nav on the left. This may be subjective, but I find the header-based dropdown model to be much less discoverable. We could have this home page with no links in the header, and with a big left-hand nav. The left nav itself can be improved compared to its initial state, but this is the idea.
(sorry for the dirty screenshot, this is just to give an idea)

cc @reakaleek

[marciw]

I found it much easier to browse/discover/grasp the scope of the docs with only one big nav on the left. This may be subjective, but I find the header-based dropdown model to be much less discoverable

+1, and I don't think it's very subjective -- having only one section of the nav displayed is not user-friendly and goes against industry standards. Users should at least have an option to show the full nav for the entire doc set, so they can grasp the whole scope as Florent mentions.

[karenzone]

Users should at least have an option to show the full nav for the entire doc set, so they can grasp the whole scope

+1 This was my first impression as well. Some users want a sense of the big picture before they engage.
Without a high-level view into available docs, we're alienating a big chunk of our user base.

Other observations:

• Users land on this page because they're looking for Documentation. Our two CTAs seem like bait and switch. As a user I want easy and obvious access to what I came looking for before you try to make me do what you want me to do.
• "View all docs" link in each subsection is misleading. Link should be labeled to make it clear that we're linking you to a subset of the docs. "View docs" would be an improvement.
• Our new information architecture gives users a road map for their journey with Elastic. We should share it.