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I recently discovered that if you're logged into Wikipedia, you can customize the UI completely. You can, of course, choose different themes. But you can also upload custom CSS and Javascript! Link to image of preferences page - https://ibb.co/Kbfh1QQ
The app supports 4 reading themes, is privacy friendly, includes: truly private reading history, trending articles, a persistent TOC on iPad, on this day in history, language and multilingual support, in the news, random articles, bookmarking and folder-ing capabilities, a way to view Wikipedia articles on an interactive map, a wikitext editor with syntax highlighting, updated article history views (with easy to read diffs), widgets, predictive search (you can even search with emojis if you please) and very soon editing notifications.
We're a small team (1.5 designers, 3 engineers, an engineering manager and a PM) and we're really passionate about making a beautiful and usable experience for readers and contributors on iOS.
I'm the lead designer/design manager and have worked on this project for five years. Commenting just as myself though (thoughts are my own and not the Foundation's), as a person who loves Wikipedia and design and is proud of the work my coworkers have done.
If you're interested you can check the app out here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia/id324715238
OP, thanks for making this, I bet it was fun to build. That being said, I want someone to do the opposite of what this does. Less chrome, less bytes over the wire, less predictive search, less "flatness?", less timely, more timeless .
Oh dang, yeah. An extension that makes the whole web look and work like the default Mediawiki skin would be glorious. And _fast_. I miss windows having borders. Just dug up a registry hack (obscene that such a thing was needed) to force win10 to have window borders again, because I keep ending up in situations where I honestly couldn't tell where one ends and the other begins. They spent decades researching and build…
But... that's the opposite of what was asked for. Adding an extension adds more of the bad. A patch for Firefox reader mode would be better in my opinion since the web itself won't become better.
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That, and the density. I like desktop UIs to be dense. They don't have to be sparse with ample padding like on mobile devices since you don't poke your fingers into your monitor. Yet somehow, people keep designing desktop UIs as if there's a touchscreen or something.
> people keep designing desktop UIs as if there's a touchscreen or something I think that also has to do with "more white space = more scrolling = more ads". Reddit is a perfect example of this. When they "updated" their UI to the current one, they added a ton of extra white space which forced people to scroll longer, thus spending more time on the site and viewing more ads. They also use a ton of other dark patterns…
When applied to the web, maybe, yes. But then there are desktop apps, and entire operating systems, designed this way.
I think it has something to do with the phones after all. Everything is "mobile first" these days (to a ridiculous degree — there's a large grocery delivery service in my city that is ONLY available through a mobile app, so they lost me as a customer), so designers have much more experience with touchscreen UIs. Desktop anything feels like an afterthought oftentimes. It's just easier to take a mobile UI, blow it up to a computer screen, or put it into a window, optionally add a dual-pane layout, and call it a day.
That, and the fact how many designers regard the result of their work as a thing in itself, an art piece to be admired, instead of merely a coat of paint on a tool that just helps people get their f-ing stuff done more efficiently and then gets out of the way.
I discovered the other day that the mobile version of Wikipedia _while on desktop_ is AMAZING. Check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager It's nicely justified for reading. Superfluous interface is almost entirely eliminated compared to desktop view. It's just such a clean, elegant view for reading a Wikipedia page.
for me, that's way worse, I much prefer to get full width, on my 32 inch monitor, it looks nicer on the default website, and fits way more stuff without needing to scroll. If I want a similar layout for "reading" I'll just use reader mode in the browser and get a very similar layout.
It’s not even close anymore: reading is just so much easier when it’s a narrow column.
Wiki pages are like 95% text to read.
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I think proper media queries breakpoints solve this
This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. Some people get quite annoyed by being bumped into a mobile experience when you resize your window from fullscreen on a laptop.
But, at least as far as I approach media queries, if you've triggered the mobile breakpoint (well, default CSS as mobile-first is the way we approach it), its because the desktop design we've used literally will break on a browser window that narrow.
This is how it looks for me: https://imgur.com/jZcbtUM
The main text is just too narrow. There's enough empty space to the right of the bodyContent div for the infobox without squeezing the text like that.
I'm thinking, it should be something like this: https://imgur.com/arNwTDr
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This is hard and often done wrong- mobile phones are usually high dpi and have gotten quite large, so it can be hard to distinguish between a large phone and half a desktop screen. Some people get quite annoyed by being bumped into a mobile experience when you resize your window from fullscreen on a laptop.
I don’t understand those people at all. If my browser window is the width of a mobile phone’s screen, than a version of the website designed for that size is exactly what I want!
The bigger problem is people hiding functionality if you're in the mobile breakpoint. That's an issue: all functionality should be enabled, at least in some way IMO. Mobile should never be a second class citizen :)
For folks who appreciate elements from this redesign, I'd love to humbly suggest checking out the Wikipedia iOS app from the Wikimedia Foundation. The app supports 4 reading themes, is privacy friendly, includes: truly private reading history, trending articles, a persistent TOC on iPad, on this day in history, language and multilingual support, in the news, random articles, bookmarking and folder-ing capabilities, a…