Early on in the design of this feature I suggested we use a drop down menu, and Matma Rex implemented a rough version of it. The UI sucked (my fault) and I moved away from it.
Here was my analysis:
*2 links side by side with reveal on hover* (what we have now)
- Pros - No change in the way the page looks - Uses lightweight controls - Cons - Hidden option - Animation is annoying - Not tablet friendly
*1 link with drop-down menu for 2nd link* (my first idea, and is now being suggested again)
- Pros - More "vector" like, for whatever that is worth - Tablet friendly - Cons - Changes the way the page looks - Hidden option - Adds heavy controls - Clicking multiple times is annoying
You can see that they both suck. I actually started a thread on this very list hoping to get ideas well before I coded this up. Instead of ideas, I got lots of people fighting about things that were off topic. Now that it's implemented and has been deployed for a month, if this is important enough for people to get serious about coming up with alternatives, than I'm still very interested in exploring them.
- Trevor
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.comwrote:
How many times have you clicked on either of these links recently? I don't mean to berate you personally, but you made four edits on your volunteer account on en.wp last week, and I really think that opinion of active editors bears more weight here, even if they are not professional designers :)
Since you asked, I'll break it down for you: with my personal account I've made 259 edits this month on enwiki. With my work and personal accounts, my edit count across wikis with VE is 472. So I've used the interface quite a bit.
I may not be a grumpy Monobook devotee, who uses script-assisted editing to make thousands of edits a week, but I've used it enough to know what I'm talking about. I think the same applies to everyone who has participated in the discussion so far, including all the designers. You should generally stay away from the "you're not foo kind of person, so your opinion means less" argument, if you don't want to look like an asshole.
-- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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