Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

#251

Post by therealdrag0 » Sun, Apr 29, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #122

SeanMacConMara wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uhm, no. It just means that people are hovering over links with their mouse. in my case every single time was by accident whilst moving the mouse around, off of other text I was trying to read. frankly, its bloody annoying it covered the text i was reading the search for yet another "disable" setting begins....

> the search for yet another "disable" setting begins.... Your inability to figure out how to disable it was already counted as success! > the rates of disabling the feature are negligibly low — a strong indicator that people find it useful. https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/w...

> To ensure that these rates were not artificially low due to usability issues, we also confirmed in a separate qualitative test that users were indeed able to find and operate the disable functionality if they desired to disable Page previews. (From their AB article)

Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

#252

Post by spiralx » Tue, May 01, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

fapjacks wrote: post #11

That preview window has been a lifesaver. Honestly, as someone with ADD (or ADHD or whatever it's called these days), Wikipedia is a fucking minefield. I regularly have many Wikipedia articles open in sometimes ten or twenty different windows, each with anywhere from twenty to fifty tabs (I open a new window to delineate a completely new tangent, or if opening a new tab will cause the tab icons to disappear, otherwis…

As another person with ADHD I've found the Tabs Outliner extension works best for me - it allows you to view tabs in a tree, label/group them, search for tabs, open/close tabs/groups/windows in one go, and most importantly the tree of tabs persists across sessions, so it can be used for bookmarking, suspending, organising and locating tabs depending on your usage - you can export it as HTML, and for a fee you can have it backed up on Google Cloud.

My work tree has somewhere over 500 items and my home one has several times that many, but it's easy to find things and keep them for later :)

Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

#253

Post by bobbobo » Wed, May 02, 2018, 10:41 AM UTC

4 years to come up with basically a hover ad?

There's nothing user friendly about this. It's forcing interaction on the user.

Hover ads are like this, if you happen to hover over a word as you scrolled then an ad popped up. This is the exact same thing. You're using one of the most hated ad techniques and calling it an enhancement. Show me any UX expert that would approve of this on any site. Show me an advertiser who doesn't love them. And you're not even making money from it.

What's wrong with an arrow or button next to the link to activate the page preview if you want? It's a simple answer and it's not deciding you know what's best for the user and shoving something in their face that requires action.

This is just piss poor UX. Hovering menu's have been a pain for years and generally not considered good design. Now here you are embedding the equivalent of hover ads in an article meant to be read.

Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

#254

Post by bobbobo » Wed, May 02, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

subpixel wrote: post #74

majewsky wrote: post #8

> People seem to like it — we are seeing 5,000 hits to our API a minute to serve those cards that show when you hover over any link. Uhm, no. It just means that people are hovering over links with their mouse. It does not imply any opinion about the previews. > The original idea was conceived four years ago When I was active at Wikipedia/Wikibooks 12 years ago, there was a user script floating around that did the sam…

I do mean to express dislike, as I'm one of the millions of users giving Wikipedia a false metric and sense of satisfaction. I've seen the pop-up hundreds of times, and have considered it a hindrance to my process every single time. Something that just happens accidentally is a bug, no matter how useful it might be if it were not happening accidentally.

I completely agree with this.

When you go from reading the Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post... any content site... then begin to read a Wikipedia entry everything you know about reading an article no longer applies. You are now forced to change what you do.

This is just the most basic no no in web design - unplanned interactions, forcing a user to interact, forcing a user to actually think about the interface.

The developers have just forced every person who wants to consume content on Wikipedia to do it differently than on every other content site.

And there are literally countless millions of people who will have no idea how to disable it, who use computers every day but have no idea how to change something.

Just an incredible UX failure.

Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

#255

Post by incogitomode » Thu, May 03, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #167

incogitomode wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind giving a pointer? Would love to default to the mobile view, but haven't been able to find the setting you're referring to. Google hasn't helped.

When you're logged in, it's the "MinervaNeue" option here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec... Sidenote, if—like me—you actually prefer the desktop theme, and would like the opposite: to use it on mobile. There is a mobile-friendly version of it in the works, but not yet available. You can try the in-progress version on your mobile here: https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?mobilactio…

Thank you! MinervaNeue worked perfectly.