[Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[brock.weller at gmail.com]

In nothing more then unscientific 'hand my laptop over to a friend, wait,
switch themes, wait, ask opinions', repeated with 11 guinea pigs (i mean
friends), it came out a wash. After 15 minutes in each theme, it was close
to a split. 7 said they preferred monobook, 4 vector. When asked to compare
visual styles and what worked, the only repeated answer was that monobook
seemed more authoritative (and one 'reminded me of a textbook', which was
explained to mean largely the same thing).

-Brock


On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
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