On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, October 10, 2014, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Making next logical steps more prominent and using color to do so in a consistent way is a common practice. Google uses red (main actions), green (sharing) and blue (navigation) as detailed in this talk http://vimeo.com/29965463. Bootstrap components (widely used all around the internet) use the same concept but with a different set of colors and meanings http://getbootstrap.com/components/. And we can find many more examples in existing UIs and design guidelines...
What I am wondering is which is the better way we can communicate this kind of design decisions to our community? Is it enough to communicate the rationale or more evidence will be needed? Is researching on specific UI components (as opposed to the broader interaction problems those solve when put together in a UI) the best area to invest our research and communication efforts?
Circulate the living style guide (after making sure it adequately explains these choices for that audience).
The disadvantage of the style guide we have is that editors expect guidelines to be described on their local wiki. You can correct for this by creating pages on some major wikis that describe the purpose of the style guide and link to it. This will then allow you to link to it in discussions and have more in depth debates on the talk page(s). It's easy to forget 90% of editors with both reasonable and unreasonable feedback won't come to a mailing list like this one. It's just not on their radar.
Updating the onwiki documentation page, with an FAQ that answers these types of questions, would be a great first step. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_UI is currently pretty bare bones. I sent some likely FAQs in another email thread. A timeline/roadmap would also be helpful (hazy is fine. Editors don't need deadlines, they just don't like surprises.), to understand when the rest of the UI currently planned at the Trello Board is likely to get development time. Clearer links to the code would be good (I added some git links, but I don't know if they're good or complete).
Adding links to Google's HCI Guidelines and similar heavily-researched reference materials, in the docs/FAQ, would also definitely help; particularly references to work at/for other academic/scholarly institutions (versus Facebook, who may have a massive UX research dept. but have a significantly different mission and target core-demographic). The video link would not be ideal (at least without a specified timestamp to skip to) because it assumes the user has a full 30 minutes to dedicate to understanding one of the answers.