Trevor Parscal <tparscal@...> writes:
I also believe that iterating on Vector is highly preferable to
introducing a new
skin. That said, to try and be as fair as I can to
Brandon, he publicly declared last year at Wikimania London, "Winter is not
a skin".
While I didn't understand his explaination of what it was, observationally
it
appeared to be the user interface equivalent of a futurist predicting a
few years into the future in reasonable detail. Some of it will end up being
true, some will not. My understanding is that the Winter implementation was
of the semi-functional prototype variety and little or none of the design
work was based on usability research of Vector, the status quo.
Isn't that research 7 years old? I remember the usability project and for
all intents and purposes is was mostly a failure. We didn't meet most of the
terms of the grants and very little came out of it, other than vector, which
is a modest change from monobook.
> In contrast, Vector really is a skin that
was implemented specifically for
production use and is now a battle tested platform from which to build upon.
Also, the UX improvements that were made over Monobook, the status quo at
the time, were based on usability research. This is a practice we should
continue with for future changes.
"battle tested" == outdated and relatively unchanged in nearly 7 years. The
web evolves and Wikimedia does not (at least for readers).
> I know that it's sometimes exciting to
people to make dramatic reveals of
proposals for sweeping changes. It's also fun to get excited about
them. However, this grand-unveiling boil-the-ocean approach never works out
in practice. It unnecessarily strains design, developement and community
engagement efforts. It is wasteful and wreckless. It is arrogant and
ignorant. It's not who we are, and it's not how we do things.
This actually works amazingly well in practice for most organizations. Maybe
Wikimedia /should/ be this and maybe it /should/ be how Wikimedia does
things. Isn't a motto of the movement "Be bold"? What happened to that?
Maybe we should change things to "Be careful; it's scary to change".
Even Vector was based heavily on Monobook, and in
every way in which early
versions of Vector deviated from Monobook, without just
cause, it was
"fixed" to be more similar. This was not wrong. Making arbitrary changes was
wrong. Starting from scratch is even worse.
Only because the community is scared of change. Every community is, though.
People got used to Vector and they'd get used to Winter after a month or
two. This happens frequently to other major sites. The thing you need to
keep in mind is that you need to actually hold strong for a few months until
people get used to things, while fixing legitimate bugs.
We should carefully continue along the path of
iterating on Vector. We
should gradually converge it's styling and
implementation with that of OOjs
UI. We should continue improving usability and accessibility on a variety of
form factors. We should perform research and base changes on the findings it
produces. This will enable us to move forward with minimal cost, and far
less drama.
It's sad that Wikimedia has given up on users.
- Ryan Lane