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 <e...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > 2011/4/4 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.ahar...@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 > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
