On 1/21/08, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Didn't you watch the promo video we just had for
the fundraiser? My
most vivid memory from it is of a woman in Indonesia editing Wikipedia
with a fullsize keyboard hooked up to her mobile phone. So be careful
with the assumptions. :)
Heh, fair point. Ok, assume that there is a range of devices which
would classify as "mobile", and perhaps we can't immediately tell how
good the interface is when a user connects. We should probably default
to something pretty basic, and, for those with the means to do so,
have a 'view' menu or something where you can crank up your
experience.
Incidentally, one thing that actually works really well is footnotes:
on my phone browser you tend to be selecting links all the time, so
you just 'click' when you're on an interesting footnote, it jumps to
the definition, and you 'click' again to be back where you started.
Very convenient. What doesn't work so well: pipetricked links
[[tubgirl|like this one]] as there's really no way to tell where a
link is going before you follow it.
Image captions also look pretty crappy and are hard to distinguish
from the main text.
Links back to the title on each section would be handy, too.
And the toolbox could really be trimmed down: all that stuff like
'what links here' and 'community portal' and stuff is pretty much
irrelevant for the basic use case. If someone is reduced to browsing
wikipedia on their phone, it's most likely that they desperately need
some piece of information to answer a query or a bet or something. It
wouldn't be unreasonable to hide all that extra guff behind some link
like 'toolbox' or something.
Steve