Thread:Talk:Athena/Some intuitive likes and dislikes

Rethinking the user experience is always a pretty monumental undertaking, so kudos for diving in and exploring some radically new ideas.

Likes:
 * Really glad that you're building a single model that incorporates mobile, tablet and desktop experience. This is indeed necessary.
 * It may be sensible to abstract this a bit further: screen size and input methods (mouse vs. touch vs. voice ...). Netbooks, for example, have small screen size, but typically no touch screens, so a "tablet UI" that assumes touch may not make sense there. In general, I notice that the word touch does not appear in the design docs, but I think we have to talk and think very explicitly about touching vs. clicking vs. speaking.
 * Really happy to see a big search box in all views. I think even in Vector, the search is still too modest.
 * Calling out "Edit" or other important calls to action makes a lot of sense to me.
 * I agree that we should definitely experiment with more dynamic UIs where it's easy to collapse/expand large elements, beyond what Vector is doing with the sidebar sections.
 * Generalized user notification mechanism FTW. This is definitely an increasingly common user expectation and it makes a lot of sense to build on this paradigm.

Dislikes:
 * I'm not a huge fan of the heavy use of black. It makes me think "death notice". Perhaps it's because of the overall size of the black areas. I also don't love how much the content area is being pushed down in the desktop view.
 * "Upload file" really needs more thinking in terms of where it fits in the hierarchy. Maybe it's sometimes a call-out action (when there's a great opportunity to add an original media file), sometimes not? In any case, it doesn't fit with the navigational links.
 * With the "context" navigation at the bottom and the "edit" action at the top, and some other actions again at the bottom, we may be negatively impacting navigation efficiency. In Vector, it's fairly easy to switch modes, take page-level actions, etc. with relatively high navigational efficiency.
 * The fixed floating/disappearing nature of the different elements doesn't yet intuitively "click" for me, and I've seen floating elements get in the way quite a bit. Obviously I'd love to try this in an interactive prototype, though.
 * "Random article" is our third most popular page, even more popular than search!  I don't think that's just because it's in the sidebar. People like viewing random articles. It deserves a nicely accessible location.

Need to ponder:
 * Since this is a pretty future-oriented design, we should think about the "edit mode" altogether. With the Visual Editor, we should be able to transform sections of the page, or the whole page, into edit mode without the heavy mode switch that's currently required (ideally without a full page reload as well). What will that mean? Perhaps tapping paragraphs or selecting text makes an edit action available; perhaps there are other implicit or explicit triggers for edit mode beyond what we currently have.
 * In the same spirit, let's think about other advanced functionality: surfacing location information, using a mobile device's voice features, etc.

Finally: Whether you like or dislike Vector, it went through lots of iterations and was very much data and research driven, so I do think it's important to not forget some of the lessons learned from the research, as well as some of the ideas from the earlier designs. If you haven't seen it yet, you'll find a lot of the thinking and research that went into the usability initiative at http://usability.wikimedia.org, and there are lots of PDFs with earlier design iterations there as well, e.g.:
 * Acai Designs
 * Babaco Designs
 * Citron Designs
 * Usability and Experience Study
 * Usability, Experience, and Progress Study
 * Usability, Experience, and Evaluation Study