I'm glad we're finally talking about this. My only concern with removing the sidebar in Vector is that it would make the content occupy 100% of the screen, further reducing readability and making layouts more difficult. 

I think that, in order to have a Wikipedia without a sidebar, two things need to happen:

1. We enclose content in a limited area (e.g. 960px)
2. We have a grid.

But, I'm glad we're talking about it :-)

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Pau Giner <pginer@wikimedia.org> wrote:

During the designs for the Translate extension, we thought on making the left toolbar disappear in some circumstances. Translators are very focused on the content and the links provided by the left side toolbar are rarely needed while translating.

The idea is to hide the toolbar initially to reduce the amount of chrome and provide a cue so that users interested in it can bring it back. I created an interactive prototype to illustrate the idea.

The design has been made under the following constraints:

• Avoid automatic moving parts. Other alternatives involving the toolbar to hide/show being triggered by scrolling were considered but the resulting change in the layout can be disorienting for the user.
• Keep the affordance for going back to the homepage. Users can be in a dead-end if they don't identify the top-left icon of the curent wiki to go back home.
• Minimal impact to the current layout. Major changes to the current skin were out of the scope of the curent project.

I wanted to share this since other tools/extensions may have faced a similar need before.

Feel free to provide any feedback, alternative solutions or info on potential problems.

Pau

This would also be a very useful thing for our work on an onboarding process. 

When trying the prototype, it took me a couple tries to figure out that the wrench icon was where the sidebar hide/unhide action was. I first tried just clicking the site logo, and dragging Vector from left to right to unhide. Something with a more menu-like icon (reuse the MobileFrontEnd hamburger?) and a simple dragging left and right might be interesting to explore. If not dragging, a smoother drawer-like action would be desirable. 

Thanks very much for this proposal Pau. I think we could perhaps go even further and consider what a "full screen" menu-less Vector might be like. I'm thinking the use case is not just systems like translations or Page Curation, but also a distraction-free editing mode. 

--

Steven Walling

https://wikimediafoundation.org/

_______________________________________________
Design mailing list
Design@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

_______________________________________________
Design mailing list
Design@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design