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Explore Wikipedia's New Look

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Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#31

Post by yamtaddle »

coldpie wrote: post #24
yamtaddle wrote: post #11

Initial reactions from watching the gif, coming in cold, having not seen the new design: 2003: Ouch. Yeah, that's bad. 2005: Great. 2011: Not worse. Maybe a little better. I have a vague recollection that some things that aren't well-showcased by a still got better with this one, but the still is at least not-offputting compared with '05. 2022: LOL are you serious? You cannot be serious. Please tell me this is unfini…

> When you are logged in to Wikipedia, the updated header will move with you as you scroll We need to stage some kind of intervention with web designers. There can't be a single person on the planet who actually likes this anti-feature. Why on Earth do they keep doing it?

If it's static, at least it's not the worst kind (though I still "select element -> remove" when I see those): the ones that bounce down when you scroll up even one notch, covering the very thing you were scrolling up to see, are the web design equivalent of someone slapping you in the face.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#32

Post by ketzu »

coldpie wrote: post #24
yamtaddle wrote: post #11

Initial reactions from watching the gif, coming in cold, having not seen the new design: 2003: Ouch. Yeah, that's bad. 2005: Great. 2011: Not worse. Maybe a little better. I have a vague recollection that some things that aren't well-showcased by a still got better with this one, but the still is at least not-offputting compared with '05. 2022: LOL are you serious? You cannot be serious. Please tell me this is unfini…

> When you are logged in to Wikipedia, the updated header will move with you as you scroll We need to stage some kind of intervention with web designers. There can't be a single person on the planet who actually likes this anti-feature. Why on Earth do they keep doing it?

Could you explain to me why this is an anti feature? It seems harmless at worst and useful at best to me, e.g., having access to the search feature and lagnuage select during scroll here. (Serious question, I feel like I am missing something after reading this thread.)

I guess I dislike it on mobile when it takes up too much space.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#33

Post by flobosg »

kerpotgh wrote: post #22
chazeon wrote: post #9

Have been using this new theme since beta. I love the much cleaner look more than the previous one. One can always tune the CSS yourself at the user's preference near the theme selector. The only thing I need to adjust to my liking is to limit the line width: main#content { max-width: 40em; } For those who hate it: you will always have the option to switch back to the old theme. I really hope any website could be as…

How do you make the max-width apply permanently to a website on chrome?

You can use an extension such as Stylebot: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#34

Post by ohCh6zos »

smarkov wrote: post #28
ohCh6zos wrote: post #26

Why is everyone moving to so much white space? I wish there was more of an emphasis on information density on the modern web.

Because it emphasizes the distinction between different parts of a website which in turn makes it easier to focus on individual things. Why are so many people against white space when it hasn't been overdone? Obviously "overdone" means different things to different people but in this case the information that matters is still pretty dense.

I took some quick measurements. The previous version leaves 2% of my browser window as whitespace containing no images or text. By comparison, the new version is 53% whitespace. That seems pretty extreme to me.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#35

Post by dymk »

ohCh6zos wrote: post #26

Why is everyone moving to so much white space? I wish there was more of an emphasis on information density on the modern web.

Because human eyes and brains aren't computers, and it's actually hard to read small text on long lines and low vertical spacing.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#36

Post by cecilpl2 »

coldpie wrote: post #24
yamtaddle wrote: post #11

Initial reactions from watching the gif, coming in cold, having not seen the new design: 2003: Ouch. Yeah, that's bad. 2005: Great. 2011: Not worse. Maybe a little better. I have a vague recollection that some things that aren't well-showcased by a still got better with this one, but the still is at least not-offputting compared with '05. 2022: LOL are you serious? You cannot be serious. Please tell me this is unfini…

> When you are logged in to Wikipedia, the updated header will move with you as you scroll We need to stage some kind of intervention with web designers. There can't be a single person on the planet who actually likes this anti-feature. Why on Earth do they keep doing it?

Because most people like it and it improves metrics.

From the discussion on sticky header [0],

> Our preliminary results show that an overwhelming majority of test participants reported positive experience with a sticky header. Participants mentioned they enjoyed the ability to access important functionality from any part of the page.

> Overall, there was an average 15% decrease in scrolls per session by logged-in users on the 15 pilot wikis in the treatment group (with the new sticky header), compared to the control group (without the sticky header). This indicates that our hypothesis was correct - adding the sticky header to the page reduced the need to scroll to the top of the page significantly.

> there was a 2.8% and a 6.8% increase in the percent of people who were able to successfully complete at least one edit using the edit button within the sticky header,

[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#37

Post by wolpoli »

I don't like the extra padding that every designer is adding into every web site and application. I need to keep multiple sites/apps on my screen as I need to look at references, work on my tasks, and communicate with others. but every designer thinks I should maximize their site/app. It's forcing me to resize and move windows all the time.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#38

Post by Gualdrapo »

wolpoli wrote: post #37

I don't like the extra padding that every designer is adding into every web site and application. I need to keep multiple sites/apps on my screen as I need to look at references, work on my tasks, and communicate with others. but every designer thinks I should maximize their site/app. It's forcing me to resize and move windows all the time.

I don't think "every" designer does that.

And not everyone wants all content crammed into a little area.

All in all, it should be up to the user decide how much content density they want on websites.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#39

Post by atsjie »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #10
psacawa wrote: post #6

Good: - Sidebar for navigation Bad: - Wasted screen space - Other languages are not available as a simple anchor tag anymore. They are hidden behind elements. It's annoying for readers who consult their own language and en.wikipedia.org in the same session. It breaks my bookmarklet to change languages, which depended on something like `document.querySelectorAll('a')`

Even in the new design the line length is way too long. I get complaints about wasted screen space, but you really don't want lines of text blasting all the way across the screen either.

Fully agree. I always downsized my window to read a Wikipedia article (I use fairly large desktop monitors, but not a widescreen). The sentences were comically large making it really hard to see what the next line is.

Even in the new design they're still a bit larger than what I'd like.

Re: Explore Wikipedia's New Look

#40

Post by dangus »

wolpoli wrote: post #37

I don't like the extra padding that every designer is adding into every web site and application. I need to keep multiple sites/apps on my screen as I need to look at references, work on my tasks, and communicate with others. but every designer thinks I should maximize their site/app. It's forcing me to resize and move windows all the time.

The article addresses this by mentioning that they referenced research demonstrating text that is too wide causes people to read less comfortably and retain less information.

The page gets much less padded when you reduce the size of the window, because the padding isn't there to make blank space, it's there to enforce a maximum line width.

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