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Wikipedia is getting a new look

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Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#401

Post by thaumasiotes »

jdlrobson wrote: post #395
__float wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it totally could be improved. Perhaps they're being careful? Elsewhere in the comments, someone showed that logged in users have more items in that bar ( https://imgur.com/llv2rtc ). That might not work so well in portrait.

I have 5 items in that bar on my Samsung Galaxy and I have no space for a label. As the screenshot shows the labels are there, just not visible until a certain breakpoint I agree that the UX could be improved and there is plenty of evidence to support that. On the other hand the edit icon is super discoverable and used without the label so I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilin…

> I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.

Multilingual sites aren't rare at all. There is a conventional way to display a language selector: it's a button (usually a dropdown menu, if you click on it) with a national flag and the name of the language.

The big problem on mobile wikipedia is that wikipedia already has a well-established way to select the language you want to see the article in, and the mobile site completely removes it.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#404

Post by systemvoltage »

epicide wrote: post #382
systemvoltage wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make good points. There is a wiggle room between column widths. https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13724/reco... Somewhere between 80-110 cpl should be adequate to satisfy most deviations in sizes. This "buffer" factor can be accounted for when designing for resizeable interfaces. Column sizes don't have to be absolutely rigid and pixel perfect. Scaling can be tackled by basing everything on em-uni…

Also very good points. I'll admit I'm not up to speed with a lot of CSS, myself. I'll definitely be looking into how to better use columns. While I think frameworks can be helpful to keeping a standard look and feel to the web, I would definitely agree that they're often used as a crutch.

Personally (I would probably get shot by saying this) but responsive design is a real problem, it is not a feature, but its a bug - a horrible one.

By appeasing to many screen sizes, we create worse UI for all 3 sizes because no one really designs them for each size separately. Widths are in percentages, flex layout allos collapsable columns and the whole thing is not built from ground up. Either the designer starts with Desktop first and then mobile is a second thought (Bootstrap), or all class names are mobile first (Tachyons).

If we design UI from scratch for each of the 3 or 4 classes of screen sizes, it would be so much better. Completely, from scratch. Not taking the Desktop layout and collapsing the columns. But doing things like button sizes should be smaller for Desktop (mouse) and larger for mobile (finger). Not a single framework does this.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#405

Post by Shared404 »

ksec wrote: post #403

130 Comments, No one mention the suggestion of Dark Mode? And if I could have a non-topic collapsed version of Mobile Site for use on Desktop would be great.

> 130 Comments, No one mention the suggestion of Dark Mode?

Came here looking for this as well.

I would like this, but I think it's more important that Wikipedia continue to be lightweight enough that it'll load on almost any device, including those without JS.

Not that those are incompatible, just thought it worth pointing out.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#406

Post by tambourine_man »

amirkdv wrote: post #135
Uehreka wrote: post #19

If someone asked me to critique the UX of Wikipedia, the first two things I’d point out would be that I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read (especially when they snake around floated images). Not changing for 10 years, watching as some trends fade and others become law-of-the-land, and then making two changes…

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one…

> Finding canonical translations for technical terms

Exactly.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#407

Post by tambourine_man »

Uehreka wrote: post #19

If someone asked me to critique the UX of Wikipedia, the first two things I’d point out would be that I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read (especially when they snake around floated images). Not changing for 10 years, watching as some trends fade and others become law-of-the-land, and then making two changes…

>and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read

Yes, reading Wikipedia on a 27” iMac is comical. Anything larger than 1000px wide is entering eye gymnastics territory. Ideally it should be around 600/700

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#408

Post by guerrilla »

amirkdv wrote: post #135
Uehreka wrote: post #19

If someone asked me to critique the UX of Wikipedia, the first two things I’d point out would be that I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) and that when paragraphs are that wide they become harder to read (especially when they snake around floated images). Not changing for 10 years, watching as some trends fade and others become law-of-the-land, and then making two changes…

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one…

In addition to these, I also use the sidebar's random button when learning a new language. Instead of committing to reading a book or reading the news its nice to just flip through random articles and trying to power through them, sometimes with the aide of wiktionary.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#409

Post by rocho »

capableweb wrote: post #270
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size and amount of JS doesn't really matter. Whether it's well written and integrated matters. How many round-trips it introduces matters. The stuff that gives JS a bad reputation is sites that slap together nested widgets that each load their resources sequentially. If you serve a 1 MB blob of all_the_things.min.js on the first page load, then gzip reduces that to ~300 KB, which will take ~2.5 seconds to load on…

On a US-normal laptop 1MB of JS might not matter too much. But for a world-normal laptop + smartphone, the size of the bundle does matter, not just for bandwidth but for performance as well. Larger JS scripts takes longer time to parse so if you have a lower power device, it still gonna suck. Everything around your program matters, but for different audiences. Wikipedias reach is huge, and getting it to work and work…

True, but for apps which are meant to be interactive you also need to take into account SPAs that might make very small requests for a good while once the main bundle has been downloaded.

So, for a world-normal device which one is better? A site that downloads 1MB of Javascript and then makes data requests of a few KBs or a site that makes a 300KB request with a page reload every time you interact with it?

My general rule is that if the application is interactive, meant to be used for long periods of time and SEO is not an issue, well-written SPAs result in better UX.

That's not the case of Reddit for example. Most users spend the most time reading comments, and that requires very little interactivity. So old Reddit is miles ahead of the new slow and bloated one.

Re: Wikipedia is getting a new look

#410

Post by wraptile »

ROARosen wrote: post #385
wraptile wrote: post #384

Honeslty I was never a fan of sticky headers and this one [1] is no exception. Is it really worth cluttering the reading space when you can reach search in your browser's bar or just pressing the home button to scroll up instead? Generally pop-ups are bad design for power users. If there's free space why not have it expanded? Instead add distraction-free-mode when clicking certain keyboard button or shortcut the arti…

Try the Wikipedia mobile site https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ which basically solves most of your issues including the sidebar and wide paragraphs.

TIL, thanks! Though I'm fine with the current design, the proposed one is what bothers me.
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