[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Guillaume Paumier]

Howie,

Thanks for your detailed message. I appreciate your efforts of trying
to listen to the feedback from the community. However, even after
listening to the discussion in the office today, and after reading
your message, I still fail to understand the logic behind these
decisions. I'm going to try and summarize your paragraphs into a few
sentences; please tell me if I got something wrong

In a paragraph, you explain it is your belief that in Monobook, the
long list of languages made it difficult for the user to identify this
area as "a list of languages".

In the following paragraph, you say you tracked the clicks in the
sidebar in Monobook, and found that less than 1% of users clicked on a
language link. You then explain you hid the list of languages because
this number showed it wasn't used.

Perhaps I'm just beating a dead horse, but, looking at these two
arguments, a fairly reasonable hypothesis to make is that users don't
click on the languages links *because* they don't realize it's there.
A fairly reasonable design decision would be to try and make it more
discoverable, and you could measure the impact easily by seeing if
more users click on the language links.

Instead, you chose to hide the list completely. I still fail to see
how this decision could be an attempt at fixing the issue you had
discovered.

Maybe users don't think of a traffic jam as "a list of cars". But
showing an empty road hardly makes things better.

-- 
Guillaume Paumier
[[m:User:guillom]]
http://www.gpaumier.org