User:Volker E. (WMF)/sandbox/External link icon Village Pump

(to be published on VPT - the technical page, not the proposals page) Hi all, Volker E. here, I'm Design Lead at the Wikimedia Foundation Product Design team and would like to provide an update to the external link icon discussion earlier on WP:VPR.

When rolled out initially, we didn't catch pixel issues on lo-dpi screens. Additionally, the old icon version featured long-standing usability issue: it was not sizing up when users increase text zoom (a common accessibility feature in use) in their browser preferences. We've seen your request on VPR and have recognized the problem statement. We then fixed the technical issues being behind vast majority of replies. And we've taken inputs by volunteers to improve the icon for better recognizability from the original proposal. For the subsequent changes on the icon itself and for future icon rollouts, we've set out a longer testing window with more explicit testing strategy.

Background of the change is providing a unified icon collection with quality characteristics for several years now. Among the characteristics are


 * Simplifying by reducing to the essential form - Given the small icon size, the lesser the details, the better they are recognized by the users.
 * Making the icons as universally recognizable as possible - Users switching from mobile to desktop should be shown the same icons for the same thing. The mobile frontend (Minerva Neue skin) has been featuring the proposed new icon for over a year already.

Other high visibility icons, which we changed were 'search', 'user avatar', 'watchlist', 'edit' (pencil) or the 'language' icon. Thanks for your attention. Do you perhaps have any questions? –Volker E. (WMF) (talk)