Thread:Talk:Athena/Some initial feedback

Hi all, I think the development of this new skin is one of the most exciting and innovative changes for Wikipedia for a long time, and to that end I hope that I can contribute towards its development in a small way. I am conscious that what stands the best chance of being helpfull is deconstructed feedback, not only saying what I like and dislike, but why I am worried about certain elements and excited about others in terms of the user experience. To that end I have started a longer more detailed post, but I think for these kind of thing "first impressions" do count for something and so I though some quick feedback would also be helpfull. I am mostly talking about the tablet experience, as that is the platform I have most experience with.

My overall "first impression" of the design is that it contains alot of exciting elements (the blue edit button, the strong colours, a much more prominent search box) but that equally the design does not hold up as a cohesive whole. What I mean by this is that many elements seem to be conflicting with each other. The big search box is (presumably) designed to make search easy and a main form of navigation, but it is surrounded by a sea of smaller buttons that will be easy to hit by mistake with finger on a tablet screen (compare with google for iPad which puts a layer of white space all the way around its search box.) The design is rounded in some places (like the blue button) and sharply angular in others (the jutting horizontal  bottom edge buttons) which seems to create a discord in the design.

The new "blue edit button" is another example of this. As far as I can see it has been placed on a grid with the gutter that will show inter wiki links, but it is the only thing contained within that "grid" by default  and as a consequence disrupts the article flow ( the smaller edit buttons below are also not changed at all, but retain fully their old design, rather than a new small "edit button being developed  to match the top one, another example that seems to create dischordance between elements).

I also noticed that your mockups don't seem to include mocked up browser chrome, which will be present unless the user uses an app to access the design. Such chrome does (on the iPad) push the article content quite a longway down the page with the big top bar (certainly over 1/4 of the way down), I suspect this is something you probably know already, and indeed I am not sure if this is a pronblem or not (on balance I felt it was still high enough)  but it was very noticeable as a difference from the mockup on a pc screen. As I say these are only my initial thoughts / criticisms, and I do emphasise there is alot to like here though, but if you have any thought on the issues I would love to here it and might mean I can be more helpfull in my more detailed feedback. Ajbp 22:46, 11 December 2011 (UTC)