Wikipedia has a functional/practical value, anything that lowers that value is bad.
Anything that can increase that value/not decrese it while making the site look better is good.
Wikipedia Redesign Concept
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#42The 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…
You raise a really good point. Any design has costs: resource costs, labor costs, technology costs. Like most redesigns, this one focuses on the visuals without any consideration of costs. For volunteer-based organization like Wikipedia, costs are particularly important. Granted, cost estimation is a notoriously difficult problem, but it at least needs to be considered.
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#43The 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…
The whole redesign seems to deeply misunderstand how Wikipedia is put together and how it is used. I don't love the current design but, like Craigslist, it better suits the asset. Many think Wikipedia, Craigslist, et al, are successful despite the "lousy" design. I would say "because".
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#44I'm stuggling to put into words how much I dislike designs like this - superheavy javascript sites that work like ass on my netbook, full of empty space and icons instead of text (so I have to hover over the icons to find out what they do - where's the sense in this??) and customized "UI" functionality that make me forever unsure what my clicks will produce. Wikipedia has a plain but very pleasant interface and this…
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 an employer, high on my list would be appropriateness and this fails miserably.
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#45Why is lowering the information density of everything now considered good design? Wikipedia's typography update a couple weeks ago brought increased line spacing and it really sucks. Facebook used to have a great information-rich design but went to 'cards' earlier this year and now I can see about 2.5 posts at a time (at 1200 lines). Medium and all the rest with their giant, bold fonts, 90+ chars per line etc. tell us that the computing audience today is expected to be mentally challenged, using some kind of handheld casino gaming device, or both. It's a sad world to wake up in for those of us who love computing.
Then there's OkCupid's question interface. The gateway to the greatest survey of all time is now more low-density crap. And somebody thought a pulldown (a custom one with its own quirky behavior, at that) was a good substitute for radio buttons.
I guess it's not surprising when you consider what the design community talks about. They don't measure anything that would let them detect a loss of computing power. They don't think about cybernetics or cognitive psychology. It's all "affordances" and other stuff that sounds like it was overheard in a 60s-era art gallery.
I can imagine a satirical redesign of the violin. They're so hard to use... Except it's too late. Only a tiny fraction of people appreciate violin music now. Such redesigns have been proposed in earnest! Shelves at electronic music departments are filled with the prototypes. Only problem: the music people made with them sucks.
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#46I 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.
You'd be surprised how many times I have to fire up the Dev Tools on websites just to have a sane line-length.
You may want to install Stylish, create an empty stylesheet with sth like
html * {line-height:170%;}
html * {color:black !important;}
html body,
html div,
html span,
html p
{font-family:Georgia !important;}
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#47The 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…
The whole redesign seems to deeply misunderstand how Wikipedia is put together and how it is used. I don't love the current design but, like Craigslist, it better suits the asset. Many think Wikipedia, Craigslist, et al, are successful despite the "lousy" design. I would say "because".
There's also something to be said for timelessness. Not everything in this redesign is on-trend or dates itself, but the front-page grid design would be just as at home on Slate or Vox. Wikipedia is going to exist 50 years from now. It's likely that gridded-out magazine cover pages won't.
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#48I 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.
Reducing the number of characters per line on Wikipedia is as easy as making your web browser narrower.
I hate resizing my web browser (it's always full screen), but I abuse the sidebar [1] precisely for that.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-in-one-si...
Re: Wikipedia Redesign Concept
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
What's the point of the virtual post-it note? Why not use a regular post-it note?
You know, not too sure. The micro-terminals make sense, but the virtual post-its seem a bit odd.