[Wikipedia-l] New "Cologne blue" user interface critique

[Axel Boldt]

(Also posted to http://wikipedia.com/wiki/user_talk:Marian)

The new "Cologne blue" skin is a tremendous improvement. I think we
should eventually make it the default.

A couple of things I would like to change:

* The exclamation marks in front of actions are not necessary and
  without explanation confuse more than they illuminate.

* The upper right "Log in" should switch to "Log out" if I'm already
  logged in.

* If the side box is switched off in preferences, we need at a
  minimum an "edit this page" link somewhere at the bottom. Also,
  there's currently a bug which displays the page header at the
  bottom in this case.

* The Wikipedia logo in the page header should be a link to the main
  page. That seems to be the standard behavior on all sites nowadays.
  Can we spend the screen real estate to use our current logo?

* "My Settings" should be "My settings", similar to "My watchlist".

* The row in the upper right should contain a link to wikipedia:Help

* In the side box, the Edit section should get the link "Edit this
  page", in addition to "Upload file". I think that's where people
  would expect it. The link should go away when editing a page. A link
  to Editing Help could be added.

* The small font (show diff) should be removed. It looks crappy, and
  "diff" is not a term that people are familiar with. Just add a new
  entry "Show last change" 

* "All pages" is pretty useless, and expensive on the server, so I
  think that doesn't need to be on the sidebar.

* "Recent Changes" is not self-explanatory. Maybe "Recently changed
  pages" is clearer.

* "Myself" should be changed to "My page", because that's what it is.

* Under "Page options", the link should be "Printable version" instead
  of "Print", because that's what it is.

* The section "Page options" should disappear if there are no Page
  options that apply to the current page, for instance when editing.

Again, please don't mis-interpret this list of criticisms: I am
strongly in favor of "Cologne Blue". A similar list of criticisms for
the current scheme would be at least three times as long.

Axel