Design October 2013

design@lists.wikimedia.org

32 participants
19 discussions

"Thoughts on humanizing Wikipedia for the mobile web" post
by Sumana Harihareswara 08 Mar '14

08 Mar '14

http://designatwikipedia.tumblr.com/post/62048718932/thoughts-on-humanizing… "With humanizing articles, we have two objectives: -Creating awareness about the editors and their interests on Wikipedia. -Promoting connections within the community using shared interests." The post shares some ideas and mockups and notes, "While the details are being refined, comments on the general direction towards contributions or alternate ideas would be super appreciated." (By the way, after this email, I'm unsubscribing from the design list as I prep for my sabbatical - more info at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-August/071542.html . If you need to talk about Wikimedia technical community stuff or communication before January, please consult Quim Gil, qgil at wikimedia dot org, or Guillaume Paumier, gpaumier at wikimedia dot org. Thanks! Looking forward to coming back in January.) -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

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Design ideas and help on an edit visualisation tool :-)
by jeph 16 Dec '13

16 Dec '13

Hi, I'm building a tool to make it easier for an editor to go through the edits/revisions in an article. The tool shows the changes in html rather than in wikitext. The content that was removed/deleted in a revision disappears & the new content/ modifications is made to appear. - Please checkout the live demo<https://googledrive.com/host/0B1hJO1N6piYFTTVZdW1mU2c0S28/visualise.html> . - My proposal https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Replay_Edits. - Some mock ups. Mock 1<https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1hJO1N6piYFM2FxVlBtakNlRXM/edit?usp=sharing> ,Mock 2<https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1hJO1N6piYFMWUzVkpsR2dmUFU/edit?usp=sharing> The demo is bare bones & I'm working on adding the following features . - Pause/Forward/Rewind buttons - Draggable timeline , to select the starting revision and the ending revision. Hoping to hear some ideas or suggestions on the slider to select the start and end revision , especially when the article has thousands of edits over five or six years. Thanks Jeph

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Bugzilla Guided Bug Entry Form
by Andre Klapper 10 Nov '13

10 Nov '13

[Please CC me on answers as I'm not subscribed.] Hi, I plan to enable a guided bug entry form on Wikimedia Bugzilla for newbies, to make reporting issues slightly easier. It can be seen on http://boogs.wmflabs.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Wikimedia&format=guided Login: test(a)test.wmflabs Password: testtest Is this utterly horrible and unusable, or can I deploy it on bugzilla.wikimedia.org without making designers scream and ignore me for the rest of my life? The CSS isn't great (at least it *is* CSS now, sigh), but I needed to start somewhere. Thanks in advance, andre PS: Quick'n'dirty CSS recommendations are also welcome. -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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Are external link icons useful
by Jon Robson 31 Oct '13

31 Oct '13

Changed subject to reflect this change in topic. Also cc'ing design mailing list. In terms of external links to me I don't care about whether I'm leaving the site or not. If I clicked on something and it wasn't what I expected that's a badly labeled link. A link saying there is more information on the [white house official website] and a link to the word [house] should be enough information to tell which I'd external and which isn't. I actually think the only place an icon next to a link really makes sense is for downloads. Clicking something that downloads a PDF when I thought it was a web page is a little confusing (on mobile at least). That said if all the external links are in the external links / references section wouldn't encouraging that organisation of links be better....? Also I agree with Juliusz that we shouldn't force behaviour of where links open. It should be up to the user if they want the same tab or new one and it should be configurable within the browser preferences. On 24 Oct 2013 16:07, "Juliusz Gonera" <jgonera(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > No, we should definitely not warn people, that's just weird ;) It's not > like something bad is about to happen. > I'm also not saying that users have the expectation that links point to > local URLs, I'm only saying that it might be a useful piece of information > to some. > > > On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman wrote: > > Its definitely a less heavy handed way of doing the thing many > (annoying) sites do when they warn you that you're leaving their site. I > just wonder is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know that modern > web users have any expectations that link within a site always point to > local site urls. > > * > * > * > * > *Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia > Foundation > M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman> > > > >

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Design Team Promotion
by Jared Zimmerman 31 Oct '13

31 Oct '13

Hello All, It is my great pleasure to announce the promotion of Vibha Bamba to Senior User Experience Designer. Vibha is recognized for her leadership in mobile design at the foundation as well as her recent efforts to “Humanize Wikipedia.” It should come as no surprise that she is one of the pillars of our design group. Her efforts to further Design internally at the Foundation as well as the Foundations standing in the tech and non-profit Design community have helped us attract new talent to the group as well as interest from community members wanting to volunteer their time to improve the appearance and usability of the projects. Please join me in congratulating Vibha on this exciting news, Jared Zimmerman * * * * *Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>

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Success, warning, and error boxes
by Matthew Flaschen 30 Oct '13

30 Oct '13

I've merged Bartosz's patch (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/82828/) for rolling out the boxes to all forms, not just vforms. He used the same colors as the vform styles. It seems to me that the success and error boxes might be better with a little more color contrast. You can test on Beta (http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/) by editing your preferences (success), going to Special:UserLogin while logged in (warning), and entering the wrong password for login (error). Matt Flaschen

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Re: [Design] [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
by Matthew Flaschen 29 Oct '13

29 Oct '13

On 10/27/2013 03:37 PM, Steven Walling wrote: > Many FOSS communities have dealt with the trade off between great-looking > fonts and freedom by commissioning foundries to get their own free fonts. > See also: Ubuntu, Android, and more. I've talked to the design team about > this idea, including perhaps getting a foundry to donate a unique font > stack in exchange for the publicity they'd get. Do we really need our own, or are there already quality free fonts we can list? Has the design team taken a good look at the existing free fonts? My general position is that it is not a violation of our principles to list a proprietary font in the stack. However, we should never *distribute* such a font. I would prefer that free fonts appear first, and that is more workable if we can find good free fonts that suit our design needs. We should also ensure that the interface does not look worse in the future than it does today, when using free fonts. Also, remember that font-matchers may substitute a free font when they are given a proprietary font name. Matt Flaschen CCing design

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Re: [Design] conflicting uses of smiley face UI component
by Jon Robson 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Recently on mobile we switched our iconography used to represent a user from > being a simplified head and shoulders to being a square smiley face. > Unfortunately, the square smiley face is already being used to represent the > thank action (via the Thanks extension). You can see an example of these two > UI elements being used on the same page in this design mock-up for the > mobile media viewer: > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media-viewer-tools-mobile-design-pa… > > As you can see, it's a bit confusing having 2 square smiley faces in the > same interface representing separate things (not to mention the square > frowny face for the flag action). > > I would suggest that we change one or the other. Since the thank iconography > has already been through much debate and revision (originally being a red > heart, then a green heart, then a smiley face), I would favor changing the > user iconography back to a head and shoulders. Thoughts? > > Ryan Kaldari

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Re: [Design] [Wikitech-l] Visualising CSS debt - cleaning up our messy codebase
by Matthew Flaschen 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

On 10/24/2013 08:27 PM, Steven Walling wrote: > Thanks for doing this Jon. > > When I used the Vector version, at first I got an all black screen, which > made me think it was broken. I guess that was just a CSS rule to click and > delete? :) Yes. > Yeah, if we don't have a bug about settling on one overlay style, we > should. This is pretty bad. Maybe the work being done to split out > ve.ui/oo.js/whatever we're calling it might help us settle on a standard? It's part of https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55534 >> * .guider_button >> > > Extension:GuidedTour. Matt will explain more I'm sure. Right. As noted, it's not actually being used. To complicate it further, I think the UX team actually now wants to go in a totally different direction with no blue buttons at all (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:WMF_DESIGN_Password_Reset.png). So we should try to finalize that if possible. That might avoid people having to go back and change their HTML twice (once to use mw-ui, another to e.g. add another layer). In some cases CSS can be changed alone, but sometimes they have to be changed in tandem, which is more code to touch. CCing the design list. Matt

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wikiHow launches redesign
by Steven Walling 24 Oct '13

24 Oct '13

Few other popular sites use MediaWiki as their primary CMS. Basically it's just us, Wikia, and wikiHow AFAIK. I'd definitely go to wikihow.com and check out what they've done in their just-launched redesign. Here's a screenshot of their previous homepage, for comparison: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/9/9a/20131019173222%21Wik… -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Design October 2013