Wikipedia Redesign Concept
wikipedia.gkvasnikov.com
wikipedia.gkvasnikov.com
Wikipedia has a plain but very pleasant interface and this would totally ruin it for me.
Just wanted to point that out before people rail on this redesign too much. There are a lot of design anti-patterns in this redesign, but, again, it's the result of having to market yourself to people who really don't know what design is.
-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
Similarly, some of the layouts of the tiles in the front-page grid appear to have carefully chosen typography. Who's doing that work?
If you dig around, I also think you'd be surprised how many high quality images Wikipedia and Wikimedia have. There is a Featured Picture[2] process that encourages and curates great images.
Wikipedia basically invented crowd sourcing -- I'm sure editors could handle custom placement, even if it doesn't turn out as perfect as a hired designer would do it.
Overall I can't imagine this is a major problem with this design, even if it doesn't always look as flashy as the mockups.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_crit...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures
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.
And why should it be changed? Wikipedia's design is one of the prime examples of "simple, clean, effective", in my mind.
Frankly, the only good idea I see here is an integrated WYSIWYG wiki markup editor. That might work, although MediaWiki markup isn't that hard to get acquainted to, and it's probably a good thing that someone should spend a bit of time to do so before making major edits.
Otherwise, this looks like some misguided attempt to make Wikipedia look more like Medium, as ostensibly Medium is the future of UX. Magpies hopping on to the newest trend, as always. Web design is notorious for this.
The front page is an overly cluttered dashboard that makes Wikipedia look like a blog, more than anything else. Unnecessary, and quite constrained.
Article pages have been turned into trailing, centered sprawls of text. Works for blogs, but not for an online encyclopedia. The present design is more suited to Wikipedia's features as a web project.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Wikipedia's font responsive and dynamic? It adapts to whatever typeface is the default on your browser.
Actually, Wikipedia switched to a new theme a few years ago.
Think about radically updating some of these to see what I mean:
- Facebook Newsfeed
- HNs homepage
- Vim interface
- Google Search Page
- Craigslist homepage
- Your favorite web mail client
- Your favorite Smartphone main screen
- Reddit homepage
You can come up with the most amazing forward-thinking improvement, and somebody without a doubt will send you so much hate that you'll think it is that person's only goal to wipe out your family line.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, it just means that we have to be aware of that section of the population and come up with a strategy that either does 1) a slow migration for the people with old mental model, 2) provides an alternative "classic" view, or 3) completely ignores that section of the population since they may represent a very small minority. I tend to go for 1,2,3 in that order, but of course this can vary differently depending on the project.
Nice job with the re-design by the way :)
Rather, it seemed like they were doing a redesign for the hell of it. Out of some belief that if something hasn't changed in X time, it should. It tries to justify itself using itself.
We've been using the Harvard architecture for decades now. Should we change it? It's been some time, after all.
But you made it, so you won't say that your own baby is ugly ever no matter how many people provide reasoned arguments
- YouTube’s failed attempt at improving the comment section
- The new mobile YouTube app entirely covers the video with supersized play/pause button.
- The odd merge of touch and desktop UI elements in Windows 8
I think a huge factor for hate is also whether the re-design was preannounced. I think, ideally the user would have the option to upgrade the page, just as they can decide whether to upgrade their phone or not.
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.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3028615/the-beautiful-wikipedia-...
http://associationsnow.com/2014/04/wikipedia-redesign-barely...
I'm not saying unsolicited redesigns like this don't have value, but there's a decent reason why an unsolicited redesign like this will never go over with its audience: Wikipedia is the ultimate design-by-committee product, and the users have a lot of say as a result.
Also, Wikipedia has to hit a wider body of users, from dumbphones to outdated browsers. That's a problem with redesigns like this in general: They're not thinking in these terms because they're designing for the high end. Wikipedia is a site that needs to prioritize the low end because it's run by a nonprofit foundation whose goal is to spread information, not just create a snazzy user experience.
It goes against everything we know about product design, and I agree it could look nicer, but the current design approach works for the Wikimedia Foundation.
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.
Otherwise this concept is fine. I'd love to see Wikipedia reset in Meta Serif or Tisa at 66-72 characters-per-line.
html * {line-height:170%;}
html * {color:black !important;}
html body,
html div,
html span,
html p
{font-family:Georgia !important;}
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-in-one-si...
Another relevant point as someone mentioned earlier is Wikipedia isn't known for beautifully curated professional photographs and design for every subject, which comprises a significant focus of the concepts. Commercial sites with similar grid designs, such as the Verge and other blogs often have a team of photographers and/or designers to maintain the aesthetic, and are more liberal with their use of copyrighted media.
Still love such new takes on established designs. Kudos to the designer for stimulating discussion and bringing a focus to what could be improved.
Of course, there will be challenges implementing this, including the lack of images that can serve as article covers (or, for that matter, user avatars). These problems can be solved if the community wanted this design; however the community does NOT want it.
A much more moderate redesign was recently whittled down until it was just an imperceptible font change; there's now a discussion about rolling that back as well.
Your time and considerable talent is probably better spent on some other projects; Wikipedia has a community that is extremely hostile to new people and ideas.
For the record, it wasn't entirely obvious at first that I could click/drag the individual rows on your site.
Also, for anyone that's curious, there have been several other redesign concepts floating around (one here: http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/), although so far this one seems to be the most thought-out.
But the cache isn't very useful since the images don't appear.
One change that would be very beneficial though, is improving legibility of articles' text by having a way to adjust the number of character per line (see http://webtypography.net/2.1.2).
The rigidity of the (old) underlying tech combined with the lack of media make this kind of attempt moot.
Anything that can increase that value/not decrese it while making the site look better is good.