Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Repository/First Prototype Feedback Report

(This was supposed to be a longer post, but the Flow dingo ate my baby, going to keep this short.)

1. How will proposed language switcher look at the main pages, where there is no first heading? Will the old menu still be available to users without JavaScript enabled (that is interesting to me because I would, in all likelihood, want to disable this interface for myself even when I browse anonymously)?
2. Why are the designers thinking that hiding sidebar behind a button has any possibility of not harming the clickthrough rate of the sidebar items? That contradicts all available research and the basic common sense (since you require more actions to get to those links, it is only natural that less people would take them). If the links featured in sidebars are considered non-essential for any readers, the WMF should just put it bluntly instead of saying that this will be tested with A/B tests.
3. The idea to replace already non-recognisable (for less proficient Internet users) hamburger icon with even less recognisable icons is rather strange. If anything, the knowledge that hamburger icon is non-recognisable should trigger research into how to make existing navigation more helpful without hiding it, not into replacing with even more obscure icons.

I am glad to hear that fixed width was supposed to be for everyone, not just for readers. I also think that that is the most controversial part of the proposal for the regular editors (but not for me).

Also, even after reading the report, I still have to say that all the provided prototypes look worse and more unappealing even than the existing Vector skin, and I hope that this would be mitigated by the time these improvements would start to be developed.

Hey @Stjn, I'd like to dig a bit into the fixed width issue. I'm just collecting feedback to better understand the perspectives of users who are active on different wikis, it's not "officially, in the name of the team" style.

On my both accounts, I've got like 90.000 edits, and I'm kinda a regular editor, and I'm still not sure why fixed width is that much of an issue? Could you please elaborate on this? I mean, ok, main pages, portals, community portals, village pumps, all not-article-like but portal-like pages where the design is of primary importance, that's one thing for sure. What else comes to your mind?

It’s not an issue for me, but I’ve heard sometimes from editors in design-related discussions that they prefer to read articles on their full page widths, probably because of familiarity bias. But I would say that for those people that care about this, the look of articles they have written probably matters a lot more than the look of portal pages and main pages.

When we’ve introduced responsive references in Russian Wikipedia, some people complained about 10 reference limit, even if you explain to them that the old way of doing things (with fixed number of columns) provided issues for users with different screen size. So that kind of resentment, ‘I have made it look beautiful for myself and you ruined it’, might definitely be present when implementing this.

@SGrabarczuk (WMF) The biggest issue with fixed width appears when using high resolution monitors. For example, my usual desktop screen is 1920 pixels wide, so the current proposal to limit the width to 1000 pixels means the content only fills up about half the page. In practice, I find reading ~250 characters per line is preferable on a large screen. The main benefit of long lines is that it significantly reduces scrolling, and makes it easier to find where you are in a page. As the report mentions, this is longer than the current design trends on many websites. However, while such long lines would be very unwelcome applied across the board,(especially for mobile) allowing the flexibility to read at higher widths is a feature of Wikipedia I think is worth preserving.

I still do not understand what the proposed fixed width layout is supposed to help. It does not seem to make sense, at least not for desktop users. If I find a text block too wide or too narrow for comfortable reading, I simply change the width of my browser window. Problem solved. Hence I also do not see a need for a collapsible sidebar except on very small screens, and would much appreciate an option in the user preferences to switch to a permanently visible sidebar with the current "look and feel". Also, in more than 10 years of using Wikipedia I kind of got used to where the links are that I need for navigating and editing, and would find it very inconvenient if I could not access them any more on a single mouse click.