One option for infoboxes might be to provide a toggling option, but keep it
expanded by default. This way the useful information is still present
initially, but if the user doesn't want to scroll for too long they can
collapse it. Alternatively, exploring the use of moving infoboxes/tables to
modal dialog windows (with a button to open them where they would normally
appear within the article) could prove fruitful.
Thanks,
Jeff Hobson
On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone,
The Mobile Apps Team met today to continue our discussion about some of
the issues we face with adapting Wikipedia articles to the small screen. In
particular, the issues we’re facing in handling tables and infoboxes.
Basically, there are two major design issues with tables and infoboxes
right now:
- Infoboxes are very long, meaning that you often have to scroll for
an excessively long time to get past them and back into the prose.
- Infoboxes don’t look good on the screen because they’re too wide and
were constructed only with how they look on large screens in mind.
These issues make article display sloppy and disincline people from
continuing to use the app. For example, quite a few staff at the office
often save articles to other apps such as Instapaper rather than using the
Wikipedia app, because we’ve not handled issues such as these properly.
The latter issue is hard to grapple with as it’s a problem which is
compounded by the lack of uniformity in the way infoboxes are used, meaning
that for every fix there are thousands of edge cases that are not handled
properly. Many of our competitor apps only trivially change the formatting
of infoboxes due to the complexity of the problem, for example changing the
font and adding or removing some horizontal lines.
The former issue, however, is a bit easier to deal with. Recognising that
tables present such large issues for small screens, the commonly taken
approach by our competitor apps here is to either totally strip infoboxes
and tables from articles, or more commonly to aggressively collapse all
tables so that the user has to explicitly choose to open them. The tradeoff
here is, of course, that the very useful information contained in the
infobox is now hidden and therefore we would have a duty to expose
information to the users, but there are lightweight ways of mitigating that
which can be considered (e.g. a little tooltip).
At this stage we have no action items out of this, but we’re continuing to
explore these things in advance of our two sprints dedicated to design
issues.
If you have any questions, let me know.
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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