Hi folks,
Brandon and I agreed that it would make sense to have a labs wiki that
we can use to spin up experimental code changes. There's a lot of
stuff that goes into MediaWiki core that requires UX/design review,
and of course there are more complex extension changes as well.
Andrew and I put some finishing touches on the wiki today; right now
Brandon and I have root on it, but I'm happy to expand that group to
anyone in the design cabal with Linux sysadmin experience. The
instance currently lives here:
http://mwreview.wmflabs.org/
I put together a simple derivative logo of the Labs logo, but feel
free to replace it with something nicer. :-)
Also, you'll find that Upload Wizard is installed here, and you can
test the new drag & drop feature that's currently in development.
You'll have to make an account and then visit
http://mwreview.wmflabs.org/wiki/index.php/Special:UploadWizard
to see it. This would be a good first test case for systematic UX
feedback against a feature in active development. :-)
Cheers,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Okay, so here's something that can be fixed.
Go here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
Scroll to the bottom. Click the "Skip this step in the future" checkbox.
Note the tooltip that appears.
It's awful. It's just plain horrible. Why?
* It's the same color as the background.
* the border color is nigh-invisible.
* the pokey bit is too shallow (which makes it invisible to people with bad vision).
I want to make a better one.
Any thoughts, or does anyone want to take this?
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
I forgot to mention in our session today (and I don't know if I missed it).
I think we should define everything: line-weights, shadow
depth/color/diffusion ... anything we can remember to name.
I would also like to suggest standardized naming practices for MediaWiki
pages and uploading images to commons. For instance, regarding icons:
something like, "WMF (project abbreviation if specific to one) (some
abbreviation of the icon name)"
WMF WP Watchlist icon
WMF Mobile Forward icon
Or whatever makes the most sense to everyone. Anything that would help make
things more identifiable, because once in commons things get a little crazy
(despite categories, etc, as people don't always search that way).
Thanks!!
Heather
Today we are announcing the designs and interactive prototypes for the
Universal Language Selector.
Wikipedia is available in 285 languages, and MediaWiki has been
translated to almost 400 languages.
Several language-related tools are available to support the
consumption and contribution of content in different languages.
These tools allow users to type text in a language for which their
keyboard is not prepared, download appropriate web fonts to display
non-Latin scripts properly and choose the language of their user
interface.
The Universal Language Selector is a tool that will allow users to
select a language and configure its support in an easy way.
When the number of languages in a list approaches 400, ease of use
becomes both a need and a challenge.
The design process for the selector started with the analysis of user
needs and the definition of representative scenarios to support.
Then, we explored different ideas in the form of sketches and
wire-frames through different iterations.
Finally, we have created interactive prototypes to test whether our
ideas work with real users, and we want to share them with the
community.
More information about the designs has been recently published at the
Wikimedia Foundation blog:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/21/introducing-designs-for-the-universal-…
We are announcing the availability of the Universal Language Selector
designs to gather feedback on the proposed solutions, and ask for
volunteers to test our prototypes.
If you want more details on the designs or want to have ideas for
improvement or criticism on the designs, feel free to do so on the
talk page for the Universal Language Selector:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector#Proposed_design
If you are a speaker of Arabic, Dutch, Hebrew or Hindi, you can also
request participation for the usability tests at http://goo.gl/QpWmu
In less than 30 minutes you can participate in the tests and
experience whether our proposed solutions work in practice for your
specific language community and context.
Pau
--
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation
I've decided we should have an IRC channel for us, so join me in #wikimedia-design
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Both Pau and Lindsay are out, so there's not much point in meeting.
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
> Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 12:42:21 -0700
>
> From: Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org>
>
To: design(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
Subject: Re: [Design] Visual watchlist
>
Message-ID: <F7A90CBF-85AA-4DEF-823C-A7FFB9F22417(a)wikimedia.org>
>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
>
> Arun, you may be interested in the work being done on New Page Triage -
> specifically the "list" view, which is an attempt to add more useful meta
> data to the list of new pages.
>
> So, before you do a lot of work on this (and you're welcome to do so), I
> think it may be useful to have a larger overview of what the "far reaching"
> plans are for watchlists and history views in general. I'll get to that in
> a bit, but I'll restrict my comments to your mockup.
>
> First, I like the idea of doing a visual graph displaying size changes.
> However, Wikipedians as a whole prefer the numbers, which is a problem
> here. Clearly, we could do a lot of neat stuff like "show the numbers on
> hover" but that defeats a lot of the "at a glance" value that people get
> out of it. Mostly people want to see if things were *added* or *removed*
> (and this is currently handled by using red and green, which is bad, but
> it's not worth fighting over).
>
>
> We can def. talk about this at the next Design Cabal meeting, if you like.
>
> -b.
>
Thanks Brandon. Clearly i have a lot to understand on this subject. I'm not
around for this week's cabal, We can discuss it next week.
-Arun