Hacker News Reader

Comment by primigenus | Hacker News Reader

> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users.

But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does.

Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with?

[1] See Aarron Walter's Emotional Interface Design as described here: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-th... for a great explanation

View on HN

I think it already delights users. Wikipedia is so absolutely content and hyperlink driven that it hardly needs much else. It's immense popularity and ubiquity is proof of that. I draw my delight not from some invasive graphics and UI work, but from the fact that when I want to read about Pyramids, I click a link on Google to Pyramids (or on the Wikipedia front page) and ALL I SEE IS PYRAMIDS. No other UI, no other stuff to interfere with what I'm trying to do. And from there, I click hyperlinks and quickly jump from Pyramids to Ancient Engineering to Trigonometry to the various mathematicians who have improved on the work the Egyptians did.

The delight is in the speed at which I can quickly explore and consume human knowledge. Nothing I've seen in terms of graphical suggestions would improve that - only distract or prevent my friends in other countries from being able to use it properly.

To me, Wikipedia is embodiment of "less is more", which supposedly all of these hotshot designers are supposed to subscribe to, but apparently mistranslate it to "a metric butt-load of negative space".

A great observation is that having access to the content provided by Wikipedia is a delight in and of itself. That's a fantastic starting point for investigating, then, how you can enhance that experience with great design.

These guys did that with this brief. It's not the right answer, but it does raise some interesting questions. How do you design a more delightful Wikipedia without damaging the content? Because surely you agree that certain elements of Wikipedia - like editing pages, for instance - could use a good bit of delight here and there.

At issue here is that many of the things they choose to pour their delighting syrup over are fundamental to the way the project is managed. We probably don't need to litigate whether MediaWiki's UX could be improved; it can. "How?" is the operative question; one clear answer is probably "Not this way."

That's the problem with designers, they always want to "enhance X with great design", ignorant of the fact that the object of their OCD desire for "great design" (in this case the world's most popular web service) obviously has great design already, as it's the most popular website in the world.

This is a horrible blanket statement. Don't call all designers ignorant because you don't like one specific proposed redesign.

Craigslist anyone?

> obviously has great design already, as it's the most popular website in the world.

Amazon has (sorry for anyone who works there) hideous design. HIDEOUS. It is a very popular website.

There are dozens of examples of websites with bad design that are popular. Many web-forums have thousands, tens of thousands, of users yet are really hard to use.

It's not particularly hard to use. You think of a topic you want to read, type it in the search and press enter. You start reading that topic. And you can click on a hyperlink to related articles within that article.

Great design already, with a few rough edges. Nothing that needs a fundamental overhaul. I would hate to see Wikipedia go the way of Digg!

Wikipedia already delights me. Dozens of times a month.

Advertising campaigns-in-disguise do not.

Can a multi-lingual interface actually convey the emotions you would like it to? I think you're asking a very interesting question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com