While I support the new direction, I was surprised to receive some in-person feedback from friends and family telling me that the animated links actually brought to their attention for the first time that they could actually edit.

Which led me to believe 2 things:

1. I think they don't listen when I talk.
2. The animated links provided value in the increased visibility, that even without animation we should seek to retain.

- Trevor

On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 12:45 AM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> The hover effect is easy to drop - if we are all willing to take the hit on
>> the clutter.
>
> That's probably the best short term option.

This is now done on enwiki, with the addition of a "beta" label. We'll
now see increased complaints and concerns about clutter, of course. :P

We do need to kick into gear thinking on the mid to long term options.
A couple of constraints I would formulate:

* primacy of one mode or another should be determined by the user as
much as possible  (i.e. wikitext users should have a happy experience
that doesn't nudge them too much to use VE; VE users should have a
happy experience that doesn't nudge them too much to use wikitext);

* let's avoid animations or hover effects that don't work with touch.

My take is that beautiful icons would work well in the mid term, while
refactoring the edit UI altogether to make the mode of operation a
secondary choice on the edit screen itself (a mode-switch on the edit
screen) might be viable in the long run, but would be especially
difficult for section editing. But I think we need to explore some
bold ideas here both for the mid and long term.

Erik

--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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