Communication about proposed and planned UI changes - Wikitech-l

15 Dec 2016

(Now forking this from the "Changes in colors of user interface" thread.)

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your email.

I don't think that our interface evolves particularly rapidly, our
interface makes me feel like it's 2003 again. I'd like to have our
interface's usability and our workflows be much easier for our users,
both in terms of learning how to use our tools and in terms of
providing guidance about how to adhere to community policies and
norms. However, editing Wikipedia and its sister sites is often much
more complex than posting an update to Facebook, and WMF lacks the
design and engineering resources of big tech companies, so I think
that we're likely to lag behind Facebook and Google for usability for
the foreseeable future.

The issue which I am attempting to address is not a UI change itself
(good or bad) but rather communication about proposed and upcoming UI
changes. Like many other help resources, the videos and their
accompanying materials (such as a quick-reference card that you
mentioned) can be updated with varying degrees of ease and cost. If
people know about changes well in advance, this will make updating
those resources a much smoother experience both for the maintainers
and for the people who rely on those resources for information.

My proposal would be that proposed UI changes which affect large
proportions of the user base should be announced 3 months in advance.
This would provide plenty of opportunity for discussion,
synchronization, and testing of proposed changes. These announcements
could be neatly organized in Tech News, and Tech News could be sent to
this mailing list as well as posted to individuals' personal talk
pages and individual wikis' village pumps. This would likely make Tech
News be a lengthier publication than it is today, but I would find
notifications like these to be highly valuable and I think that other
community members would too. English Wikipedia for awhile had a
wiki-specific list of proposed changes (largely focused on policy, but
also related to technical matters and community organization) that ran
in the Signpost; what I envision for Tech News would be similar except
with a longer time horizon and aimed at technical and design
audiences.

What do you think?

Pine

On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 2:07 AM, Adam Wight &lt;awight(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
...
  Hi Pine,

 That's a really interesting question you bring up, that people develop
 associations between colors and exact positions on the screen, so that
 moving or discoloring a button will jar them out of a pleasant, easy to
 anticipate experience, and will invalidate some of what they learned,
 possibly making the videos less effective teaching tools as the interface
 changes.

 I'm not sure what we (wearing my WMF hat) can do to help with the problem,
 however.  Change control at the level you're talking about would mean a
 radical reworking of our deployment strategy.  As I understand it, the
 alternative is to stockpile code changes and do big software releases on a
 longer timeline, but that's a somewhat discredited approach.  If we stick
 to the lighter, weekly deployments then it's inevitable that the interface
 will be evolving rapidly.

 Also, let me thank you for your work on the instructional videos!  I'm sure
 these will make a huge difference for newbies and might even attract new
 editors.  In an ideal world, we could write scripts to automate the UI
 segments you'll be filming, and could even replay them later and replace
 segments to publish new editions of the videos.  Short of that, however,
 maybe you could distribute a companion quick reference card, which would be
 easier to keep up-to-date and would illustrate the placement and coloration
 of major components.

 I'm happy to see so many of my colleagues in this thread, and feeling
 immensely proud that such a potentially explosive issue (the bigger issue
 of WMF deployments in the context of broader community consensus and
 engagement in the process) was discussed at length, yet there was nothing
 but an outpouring of generosity and assumption of good faith.  This is when
 it feels good to be a Wikimedian!

 I do think we should start new threads for potential ideas to improve WMF
 deployment communication.  Amir's announcement was a wonderful model of
 developer citizenship, and I think the palette change itself is beyond
 reproach.  Continuing here makes me uncomfortable really, because our focus
 should not be on Amir's patch or even his announcement, but on the bigger
 issues of two-way communication.  Making sure we're targeting policy for
 criticism rather than people is essential to this healthy
 communication--otherwise some of us will feel obliged to defend the person
 being targeted and will struggle to be receptive to the constructive
 content.

 Warm regards,
 Adam 