On 04/06/2012 07:01 AM, Niklas Laxström wrote:
On 6 April 2012 12:41, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Chad recently mentioned that based on opinion of wikimedia users, most of users prefer simple options, I guess we could create a feature, perhaps a checkbox "Display advanced options" to user preferences, move lot of current settings which aren't really supposed to be changed by people who do not understand how they work and implement various new options in that.
I think sweeping the problem under the carpet just like that is a good idea. I don't oppose hiding some preferences by default, but only if we consider also these issues:
*1 Changing preferences directly from where they are used (like from special pages) *2 Make sure we are not going to add new preferences just because they are not shown by default anymore *3 Make sure each preference label is understandable, amending with longer description where needed. There must be enough information that *any* user can understand what the preference does after reading the provided information. *4 Not call them 'advanced' but something that indicates they are rarely used and only relevant to minority of users. In other words, the criteria for hiding must be the number of users, not difficulty of understanding the preference. *5 Have sane defaults, obviously.
Re 5: For example I hate that I must everywhere change enhanced recent changes to be the default. -Niklas
This is an interaction design proposal, so I'm bringing in Brandon Harris, the WMF's senior designer. Brandon, could you comment on this?