[Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Erik Moeller]

2011/4/4 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> For example, in the Hebrew Wikipedia there was a Search and Replace
> gadget long before the advent of Vector's Search and Replace dialog.
> It was developed due to popular demand, bottom-up, by a volunteer, and
> - here's the scariest part - without any grants. It is still used in
> the Hebrew Wikipedia, probably much more often than the Vector thingy,
> which is still rather useless due to bugs such as 20919 and 22801.

As lovely as bottom-up gadget development is, it also highlights the
complexity of our challenge in improving usability: By allowing every
community to independently develop improvements to things like the
toolbar, we're very much creating a risk of degrading usability over
time. After all, if you're complaining about the lack of data and
formal testing supporting Vector, what justification is there for the
vast majority of user-contributed JS changes, which in many cases have
terrible UIs and have no formal or informal user testing or supporting
data?

And honestly, Hebrew Wikipedia is a great example of this. Just a year
after Vector, the standard edit page that even logged out users see
has a whole new row of icons in the "Advanced" section of the toolbar,
including some very non-intuitive or just plain ugly design choices
which are inconsistent with any of the existing icons. Is there any
supporting data for the choices that were made as to what was added to
the toolbar?

Of course the answer isn't to prevent gadget development, but I do
think we need (as Brion highlighted in the wikitech-l thread) much
better support systems, consistently enforced style guides, etc. In
addition to better analytics systems, that _should_ ultimately include
access to WMF design and user testing resources to validate gadget
changes, better standard code and icon libraries that gadgets can use,
etc.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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