Design/How to give design feedback

This page provides interested parties with a guide on how to give constructive feedback on Wikimedia Foundation Design.

Quick guidelines for providing feedback
These are some general guidelines for providing useful design feedback:
 * Be civil. Aggressive or abusive language (e.g., "how could you be so stupid as to do this") will likely have the exact opposite effect than desired.
 * Be concise. The shorter you can make your feedback, the better. This isn't because we don't want to hear what you have to say - we do - but there are only so many hours in the day and yours isn't the only feedback we'll receive.
 * Be clear. - The easier your words are to understand, the faster we'll be able to iterate.
 * Be focused. If the design was presented with some specific design goal, or in the context of a scenario, try to focus on them as much as possible. If you have concerns about the relevance of the proposed context or problems in a different context, make it explicit.
 * Provide reasons. - It helps us to understand why something may or may not work if you can tell us why.
 * Suggest alternatives. - Other ideas are always welcome!

Design resources
Those of you who are interested in learning about design and design processes may wish to read the links below. The more you know about design, the better feedback you can give.

Usability

 * Nielsen's 10 Heuristics - a popular, concise list of usability heuristics
 * Bruce Tognazzini's Heuristics - a larger collection of usability heuristics
 * Usability.gov - the US Government's collection of web usability principles
 * UX Myths - collection of common User Experience misconceptions baked with research data.

Design patterns

 * Dribbble - a design community with many user interface examples
 * UI Patterns - a collection of user interface patterns
 * pttrns - a collection of mobile user interface patterns
 * Mobile Patterns - another collection of mobile user interface patterns
 * Android Niceties - another collection of mobile user interface patterns, with a focus on Android

Typography

 * Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton - a free, online book explaining the basics of typography
 * The Elements of Web Typography - another free, online book that covers the basics of web typography
 * Dyslexic.com: Fonts - a guide to typographic accessibility for dyslexics

Color Theory

 * Basic Color Theory Tutorial
 * Color Theory on Wikipedia