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isnt there a way to have your cake and eat it too? WIkipedia is CC-BY-SA so it should be possible to maintain a mirror of Wikipedia with a more souped up interface? I guess the costs of maintaining would be pretty high but Wikipedia allows commercial use so you should be able to slap some advertising on it. in fact im suprised people havent tried this already. perhaps they have?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing that this is just portfolio fodder for the designer. For better or worse, recruiters (and hell, even managers) are looking for UX designers that have the capacity to design trendy looking stuff and have a grasp of what's somewhat relevant. Hence, redesigning a hugely-popular site like Wikipedia to look like a recently-redesigned mobile first news site. Just wanted to point that out before people rail on…
As a developer with a blind spot for design anti-patterns, can you elaborate on those?
-The layout switches between using icons and text as buttons/menu items on the same page
-The homepage looks like aol/yahoo's landing page - too busy and no sense of direction
-theres like 3 different bar selection menus on the front page, all in different places that do dramatically different things. I don't have any kind of visual cues into what the bar menu on the top or right do.
-gigantic images and padding reduce information density
The heavily-graphical "grid" front page assumes that the best Wikipedia articles have curated, attractive graphics to place in the grid. As a rule, they do not. Wikipedia is a volunteer project, and there are no editors or in-house designers to keep articles fashionably decked out. Not only that, but Wikipedia is at a disadvantage w/r/t/ graphics: the site tries to be scrupulous about copyrights, and can't appropriat…
Do you design for the worst-case, where you're lucky to get a little attention from overworked volunteers working outside their areas of competence? Or for a more hopeful case, where any gaps in the design will signal an opportunity for eager, precocious volunteers to do more?
I believe Wikipedia has had good success in the past with campaigns to fill in CC-licensed rich media, especially volunteer photographs, where they've been missing.
The problem of re-designing something as popular Wikipedia (especially something useful that has not changed in 10 years!) is that regardless of the result (i.e. better or worse), you will face _fierce_ opposition. Humans are very sensitive to anything that changes their mental model of how they think something should work. Think about radically updating some of these to see what I mean: - Facebook Newsfeed - HNs hom…
Something really interesting (and relevant) is that in cases where a redesign makes an interface markedly easier, it can still perform less favorably simply because people liked knowing how to do something that most people couldn't (i.e. using said interface). Take Ideo's redesign of the Bloomberg example, for example. http://www.ideo.com/work/bloomberg-terminal-concept
The rigidity of the (old) underlying tech combined with the lack of media make this kind of attempt moot.
The heavily-graphical "grid" front page assumes that the best Wikipedia articles have curated, attractive graphics to place in the grid. As a rule, they do not. Wikipedia is a volunteer project, and there are no editors or in-house designers to keep articles fashionably decked out. Not only that, but Wikipedia is at a disadvantage w/r/t/ graphics: the site tries to be scrupulous about copyrights, and can't appropriat…
And yet, moving to a design that highlights a 'main graphic', or bit of hand-crafted typography, could actually prompt that volunteer work when people notice it's missing. Do you design for the worst-case, where you're lucky to get a little attention from overworked volunteers working outside their areas of competence? Or for a more hopeful case, where any gaps in the design will signal an opportunity for eager, prec…
The problem of re-designing something as popular Wikipedia (especially something useful that has not changed in 10 years!) is that regardless of the result (i.e. better or worse), you will face _fierce_ opposition. Humans are very sensitive to anything that changes their mental model of how they think something should work. Think about radically updating some of these to see what I mean: - Facebook Newsfeed - HNs hom…
If so, these existing designs are really the best-of-the-bunch, beating out the competition, and perhaps this is because they are better on criteria that have been overlooked or not fully understood.
Now that Facebook, Google, Wikipedia have "won" the competitions in their original space, we might believe they are no longer under strong selective pressure of competitive evolution.
Facebook and Google might therefore be inclined towards major redesign which benefit them more for commercial reasons. This alienates some people, yes, but since the companies no longer have to fear immediate challenges from competitors, they can afford to provide users with a less optimised and more profitable design.
Wikipedia has no real motivation to change the design away from one which is known to be good: nobody strongly benefits from a major redesign.
I don't understand why designers refuse to pay attention to typographic guidelines. 95 characters per line is not very readable. To be fair, Wikipedia already suffers from this problem. Between 100-character lines and sans-serif body copy, Wikipedia's current typography is abysmal. Otherwise this concept is fine. I'd love to see Wikipedia reset in Meta Serif or Tisa at 66-72 characters-per-line.