On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
- Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com [Fri, 5 Mar 2010 12:15:46
+0100]:
2010/3/5 Chris Lewis yecheondigital@yahoo.com:
They were not back in 2005 =)
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since
then.
We have heard. It's just that no one has cared since 2005 apart from the aforementioned Stanton-funded usability team, which developed the Vector skin. Like I said before, if WMF can't or won't dedicate one of their few developers' time to something and no one in the volunteer community cares, it doesn't happen.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
When one looks for educational / academic content, rich and colorful interface only distracts the reader. The following site is not mediawiki / monobook based, yet the visual design is simple: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html There is nothing wrong with it. Actually, there is real beauty in simpicity. Dmitriy
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Agree wholeheartedly. Sleek graphics and spinny Ajax loaders do not inherently make a good design. It's about pleasing the eye and being as intuitive as possible. We've got a general bug open[1] for cleaning up the UI and drafting some standards for future UI work. I really like where [[Manual:Coding conventions]] has gone in terms of defining what we expect from our programmers. Something similar (Manual:UI Conventions?) would help in setting a standard to expect when creating our user interfaces.
On a semi-related note: I'm going to plug The Smashing Book[2] as a good read for MediaWiki developers. It's got a lot of really good information on Usability, UI, optimization techniques, color usages, etc and makes for a well-rounded read for people working on web apps. I know Andrew and Guillaume both have copies as well and (as far as I know) have enjoyed it.
-Chad
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/13747 [2] http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/03/smashing-book-its-out-now/