Trevor Parscal <tparscal@...> writes:
I also believe that iterating on Vector is highly preferable to
introducing a new skin. That said, to try and be as fair as I can to Brandon, he publicly declared last year at Wikimania London, "Winter is not a skin".
While I didn't understand his explaination of what it was, observationally
it appeared to be the user interface equivalent of a futurist predicting a few years into the future in reasonable detail. Some of it will end up being true, some will not. My understanding is that the Winter implementation was of the semi-functional prototype variety and little or none of the design work was based on usability research of Vector, the status quo.
Isn't that research 7 years old? I remember the usability project and for all intents and purposes is was mostly a failure. We didn't meet most of the terms of the grants and very little came out of it, other than vector, which is a modest change from monobook.
In contrast, Vector really is a skin that was implemented specifically for
production use and is now a battle tested platform from which to build upon. Also, the UX improvements that were made over Monobook, the status quo at the time, were based on usability research. This is a practice we should continue with for future changes.
"battle tested" == outdated and relatively unchanged in nearly 7 years. The web evolves and Wikimedia does not (at least for readers).
I know that it's sometimes exciting to people to make dramatic reveals of
proposals for sweeping changes. It's also fun to get excited about them. However, this grand-unveiling boil-the-ocean approach never works out in practice. It unnecessarily strains design, developement and community engagement efforts. It is wasteful and wreckless. It is arrogant and ignorant. It's not who we are, and it's not how we do things.
This actually works amazingly well in practice for most organizations. Maybe Wikimedia /should/ be this and maybe it /should/ be how Wikimedia does things. Isn't a motto of the movement "Be bold"? What happened to that? Maybe we should change things to "Be careful; it's scary to change".
Even Vector was based heavily on Monobook, and in every way in which early
versions of Vector deviated from Monobook, without just cause, it was "fixed" to be more similar. This was not wrong. Making arbitrary changes was wrong. Starting from scratch is even worse.
Only because the community is scared of change. Every community is, though. People got used to Vector and they'd get used to Winter after a month or two. This happens frequently to other major sites. The thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to actually hold strong for a few months until people get used to things, while fixing legitimate bugs.
We should carefully continue along the path of iterating on Vector. We
should gradually converge it's styling and implementation with that of OOjs UI. We should continue improving usability and accessibility on a variety of form factors. We should perform research and base changes on the findings it produces. This will enable us to move forward with minimal cost, and far less drama.
It's sad that Wikimedia has given up on users.
- Ryan Lane