The original intent of the UX team, as I understand it, was to help readers find essential (frequently clicked) elements in the navigation more easily by collapsing less essential ones.
It has been legitimately argued that the language links are essential for many users, even if the click rate is lower than that of some other elements, and that they are also key to surfacing our value of language diversity. The reasonable hypothesis has also been presented that the click rates are higher in other languages than English.
The legitimate counterargument is that the naïve link list does not necessarily do the best job at this: by presenting the one or two links that may be relevant to the user within a potentially (and hopefully) very long column of foreign words in sometimes foreign scripts, it's a reasonable hypothesis that users will not in fact discover or understand the availability of -their- language, but rather simply glance over the list.
Howie has presented the outlines of a new compromise approach: that by presenting a limited number of links by default, we increase the discoverability of the feature, while also limiting overall page clutter. That's also just a hypothesis.
I would suggest the following approach:
1) That we return to the default-expanded state for now. If we want to default-collapse again, we'll need some more compelling metrics that demonstrate the actual benefits of doing so.
2) That we prototype the system above, or some variant thereof, define key metrics of success, and A/B test it against the existing one, provided the idea doesn't turn out to be obviously flawed.
I agree that this isn't the highest priority issue on the list of UX fixes and changes, so by implementing 1), we can do 2) on a timeline that makes sense without a false urgency.
The BlackBerry issue is indeed of greater importance. It only affects a subset of BB models, apparently older ones from what I've seen. Hampton, Tomasz and Ryan Lane have been working on getting VMs with the BB simulators set up, so that we can a) debug Vector on different BB versions, b) test the mobile redirect and mobile site on BB before we enable a redirect. This was delayed by ops issues on the mobile site, but I hope we'll get It sorted out next week.
For the record, I agree entirely that read-breakage of this type is a critical, high priority bug.
Erik
On 6/5/10, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:37 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
Feedback is great, but it irritates me when people start using words like "stupid" -- that's what I was responding to.
Perhaps you misread the context. Austin wrote the word "stupid" as a hypothetical example of nonconstructive commentary that should be avoided. No one has hurled an insult.
Moreover "feedback" can itself be perceived as an insult.
Imagine that someone cleaning your office took your important paperwork and dumped it in a bin. You complain— "Hey we need that stuff to be accessible!" and they retort "Thank you for your _feedback_. We'll consider it during our future cleaning plans".
We're not just providing feedback here. We're collectively making a decision, as we've always done, thank you very much.
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