On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 4:00 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
My views are most closely aligned with Ryan to be honest and
historically I've lost 3rd party users to mediawiki instances because
of how it looks, and the choice isn't great out there. I'm yet to meet
someone outside our community who likes how Wikipedia looks, that's
always the first thing they complain about. I fear we suffer from
Stockholm syndrome working in our codebase that we forget about those
voices that don't get heard. We are the .001%!

If the problem is that important voices (readers') are not being heard, the solution is to ask them, not push for global deployment of a completely new and basically untested UI concept. Readers are no less opinionated than editors, and their wants and needs are no less important or heterogeneous. Whether Winter looks more in line with someone (Ryan's?) idea of "the industry standard" in 2015 than Vector doesn't mean it provides a better experience for anyone.

You can't just assert that Winter's an improvement; you have to test. Winter was designed based on a certain set of assumptions on what people want out of their Wikipedia reading/editing experience. Even if you believe, as I do, that many of these are good/clever/inspired assumptions, Winter (or new features introduced by Winter) still needs to be tested before they are deployed as the default option on Wikimedia wikis. Vector was also designed based assumptions... but it also had the benefit of a whole lot of user testing and community consultation.
 
I think it's okay to iterate, but from my many experiences in the
mediawiki skin world, you have to leave the status quo as an option
and make the new skin experience opt in. Even then it's hard to get
things out of opt in mode - personal compact toolbar was well received
on the most part but a complete hack in implementation yet I saw no
progress in consolidating it into our experience.

The fact that iterating takes time, and that it's hard to get existing users to adopt new software, is not a valid argument for making sudden, sweeping changes to the desktop Wikipedia interface. Iterating takes time because when it's done well (read: when you're actually iterating, rather than making ad hoc changes), the software is being improved for the people it's designed for and for the things its designed to do. If you think it's going to be hard to drive adoption of incremental UI improvements, try getting buy in on a whole slew of them introduced all at once, without a solid rationale or empirical evidence to back up your decision. 
 

Vector is not evolving, otherwise it would have happened already. The
only changes to it in the past 3 years have been badly received
typography changes and minor tweaks.

This sounds like a problem with process, not a problem with Vector. Switching to Winter won't fix it. If we somehow managed to introduce Winter tomorrow, how would we assure that it continued to evolve?
 
 

Traditionally, more skins has created more headaches, but maybe it's
time to rethink this infrastructure [2] and encourage a more abundant
selection of skins on our wikis. From my perspective the lack of
competition in the Wikipedia skin world is preventing innovation. FWIW
I'd love to have a go at making a new skin based on Winter's ideas in
my spare time with a fixed header, but given that I have no confidence
it will ever get on the cluster I have no motivation to do this. Where
is Apex deployed for example [3]? Why can't I try this out on
Wikipedia and see if I prefer the experience?

This seems to be the heart of the problem (at least, the problem for WMF as a software company). We need to make it easier to test and then incorporate test results (including direct user feedback) into products. Again, this is a process/infrastructure issue, not a problem with our current UI. Tests can be standard usability studies; single-user opt-in deployments (like beta features); time-limited pilots for a single wiki, namespace, or page; or controlled A/B tests with random sampling of a class of users. None of that has anything to do with whether Winter is better, or worse, than Vector.

I like Winter. I'd like to see us move in that direction. But what I really want to do is test whether Winter works for the people it's supposed to: readers and editors. Because not everyone likes what I like, and not everyone interacts with Wikipedia/MediaWiki the way I do. 

We're talking about Winter like it's one thing, but it's really a collection of bold, interesting design ideas. I find many of these design ideas compelling ('sticky' search/menu bar; responsive design), other less so (hiding the ToC under a hamburger menu...ugh). It's not an all or nothing proposition with Winter, or with Vector. We should be talking about how to upgrade our testing infrastructure and our design process so that we can incorporate the best parts of Winter into the default MediaWiki user experience of MediaWiki. Then we can call it whatever we want.

 

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Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation