5 ms·

> the wide range of functionality on the site can feel overwhelming and difficult to understand I guess it must just be my lengthy history with the web, but th

by tspike 6y ago

> the wide range of functionality on the site can feel overwhelming and difficult to understand I guess it must just be my lengthy history with the web, but this line is like nails on a blackboard to me. It's OK to have to learn how to use powerful tools!

mostlysimilar 6y ago
I feel the same way. I wish interface designers would focus on ways to get people comfortable with experimentation instead of removing features entirely.
- ryderdini 6y ago
  In this case, no feature is being removed--just hidden in a collapsible sidebar, but I agree with your overall point.
tomtheelder 6y ago
Having to learn how to use powerful tools is absolutely fine when the tool is a specific one designed to be used by power users. For something like Wikipedia for whom the bulk of the audience visits briefly and occasionally to grab information, it's not a good thing. I think a lot of us are scarred by changes like these to our "power tools," which can be incredibly frustrating, but Wikipedia is a different beast. Your design should fit your audience, and I think it's a good change to have a sidebar with tools that are surely ignored by the _overwhelming_ majority of users not be presented in a persistent, important location. Also worth mentioning that they aren't removing anything, just altering presentation to better suit the common use case.
- jbay808 6y ago
  That seems obvious but it's not necessarily true. It seems to be an increasingly popular philosophy in this data-driven era of telemetry though, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I want Wikipedia to be as convenient as possible for the editors/authors, even if most users are readers. The authors -- even as a small minority of users -- create the content that, in turn, attracts the readers. It's possible that alienating authors to prioritize the reader experience ends up driving away readers through the second-order effect of driving away authors. (I'm not saying that these particular Wikimedia changes are an example of this, just illustrating a mechanism by which prioritizing the experience of the majority of users can end up harming them in the long run, because second order effects are important too. Wikimedia seems to have thought carefully here, which is good). An extreme example of this philosophy would be noticing that the vast majority of your users never touch the edit button, and so getting rid of it entirely to streamline the interface for everyone else.
  - Kuinox 6y ago
    then make a special UI that editors/authors can enable in their preferences...
    - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
      'Editors' and 'readers' is not a binary dichotomy. One of the great things about Wikipedia is that anyone who happens to be reading an article and notices an error can correct it without much friction.
      - jessriedel 6y ago
        This is mostly only important insomuch as it helps recruit new editors. As a fraction of effort, those drive-by non-logged-in edits are a trivial contribution.
jrochkind1 6y ago
I think ideally there might be powerful features of the tool that take some time learning, and that's okay. But the tool itself should have simple features that can be used by a newcomer too. The tool itself should not be "overwhelming and difficult to understand" -- I mean "overwhelming" is never a plus, is it? The power-user features should be designed in such a way they don't scare off or interfere with more basic use. Rather, the basic use should be low-barrier, and serve as a step to investing to learn the more challenging use. "simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." (Alan Kay). Not "everything should be hard and complex because we are resigned that that's the only way to make complex things possible." I think this is true as a general rule, but it may also depend on the "product" (whether commercial or noncommercial like wikipedia). There may be some products where it's okay if you scare off newcomers, where you know you have a core that will be willing to invest the time to figure out a challenging or even "overwhelming" tool because of it's value to them, and that's all you need/want. But I don't think that's appropriate for wikipedia, I think it is the absolutely correct choice and in line with wikipedia's mission to prioritize making basic wikipedia use as low-barrier as possible for as many users as possible.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  So I think Wikipedia's bar for use is pretty low. To bring it much lower (i.e. to Twitter or Facebook levels) might reduce quality because people will be more willing to make changes while requiring even less time investment. Wikipedia has wildly succeeded and mostly avoided the fate of other social media sites. We must tread very carefully to keep Wikipedia for future generations.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    So these particular changes are more about the UI for viewing/consuming content than editing/creating. And I'm suspicious of the theory that a harder to use UI for editing results in higher quality content. I understand your theory that some people who would edit content maliciously or without proper care would be put off by a harder to use UI, but it's not obvious to me that it's true, or that it wouldn't be countered by putting off even more people who would have good intentions and take proper care, some of whom correct malicious content. When making decisions for a site that millions use, you probably don't want to make significant strategic decisions, like to intentionally not make the UI as easy to use as you can, based on hunches. But anyway, wikipedians have actually had the opposite concern of yours for a while, rather than increasing to "too many" contributors, wikipedia seems to be losing contributors, and many see it as a problem. Both because you need enough contributors to maintain content, and because the self-image of wikipedia is that "anyone can edit", they actually want to make it accessible, not put barriers in the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_losing_contributors_-_Thinking_about_remedies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los... More info about who contributes to wikipedia is on the following page, which suggests about 132K users in the last 30 days. I don't know what the number is for how many users viewed wikipedia in the last 30 days but I'd guess far under 1% of wikipedia users make edits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...
drchopchop 6y ago
Wikipedia already contains a huge amount of "powerful" tools in the sidebar, that most casual users would never want to interact with. Upload file, recent changes, what links here, etc - pretty much all of these are irrelevant for people who aren't editors.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Except the whole point of Wikipedia is that everyone is potential an editor...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
kube-system 6y ago
I think the appropriate direction depends on your audience. Being powerful is often a trade off with accessibility.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
Tools meant to be used by laypeople need to make a good first impression. A mainframe-style UX where you have to type magic letters to trigger functions is great once you've gotten used to it, but the average user will not put in this effort and simply use something else instead (compare e.g. vim vs. nano). You can afford that sort of UX when you have users who don't have much of a choice and/or will spend a lot of time using that specific tool (which is why vim is still a thing). That's the case for e.g. airline booking systems for agents, not the case for airline booking websites for average users, and not the case for Wikipedia either. The best UX for this is a UX that is simple, yet still provides the advanced features, and ideally makes them discoverable. A classic example would be menus: You can either slowly click through the menu with the mouse, you see all the options, and you see the underlined letters that will allow you to navigate the menu much faster if this specific menu is worth learning. Additional visual clutter can be overwhelming, even to experienced users, especially if it's not well separated from the important stuff (it can simply make the important things harder to find - compare e.g. the toolbars of Google Slides and OpenOffice Impress). But good design can easily counteract this. For example, you could use a grey background on the unimportant stuff to let people focus on the important stuff. Which is why Wikipedia is doing. It's not as if the presence of that toolbar is going to distract someone from the only other task that can be done on the page, reading the article that takes up the entire rest of the screen...

by tspike 6y ago

mostlysimilar 6y ago

I feel the same way. I wish interface designers would focus on ways to get people comfortable with experimentation instead of removing features entirely.

ryderdini 6y ago
In this case, no feature is being removed--just hidden in a collapsible sidebar, but I agree with your overall point.

tomtheelder 6y ago

Having to learn how to use powerful tools is absolutely fine when the tool is a specific one designed to be used by power users. For something like Wikipedia for whom the bulk of the audience visits briefly and occasionally to grab information, it's not a good thing. I think a lot of us are scarred by changes like these to our "power tools," which can be incredibly frustrating, but Wikipedia is a different beast. Your design should fit your audience, and I think it's a good change to have a sidebar with tools that are surely ignored by the _overwhelming_ majority of users not be presented in a persistent, important location. Also worth mentioning that they aren't removing anything, just altering presentation to better suit the common use case.

jbay808 6y ago
That seems obvious but it's not necessarily true. It seems to be an increasingly popular philosophy in this data-driven era of telemetry though, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I want Wikipedia to be as convenient as possible for the editors/authors, even if most users are readers. The authors -- even as a small minority of users -- create the content that, in turn, attracts the readers. It's possible that alienating authors to prioritize the reader experience ends up driving away readers through the second-order effect of driving away authors. (I'm not saying that these particular Wikimedia changes are an example of this, just illustrating a mechanism by which prioritizing the experience of the majority of users can end up harming them in the long run, because second order effects are important too. Wikimedia seems to have thought carefully here, which is good). An extreme example of this philosophy would be noticing that the vast majority of your users never touch the edit button, and so getting rid of it entirely to streamline the interface for everyone else.
- Kuinox 6y ago
  then make a special UI that editors/authors can enable in their preferences...
  - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    'Editors' and 'readers' is not a binary dichotomy. One of the great things about Wikipedia is that anyone who happens to be reading an article and notices an error can correct it without much friction.
    - jessriedel 6y ago
      This is mostly only important insomuch as it helps recruit new editors. As a fraction of effort, those drive-by non-logged-in edits are a trivial contribution.

jrochkind1 6y ago

I think ideally there might be powerful features of the tool that take some time learning, and that's okay. But the tool itself should have simple features that can be used by a newcomer too. The tool itself should not be "overwhelming and difficult to understand" -- I mean "overwhelming" is never a plus, is it? The power-user features should be designed in such a way they don't scare off or interfere with more basic use. Rather, the basic use should be low-barrier, and serve as a step to investing to learn the more challenging use. "simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." (Alan Kay). Not "everything should be hard and complex because we are resigned that that's the only way to make complex things possible." I think this is true as a general rule, but it may also depend on the "product" (whether commercial or noncommercial like wikipedia). There may be some products where it's okay if you scare off newcomers, where you know you have a core that will be willing to invest the time to figure out a challenging or even "overwhelming" tool because of it's value to them, and that's all you need/want. But I don't think that's appropriate for wikipedia, I think it is the absolutely correct choice and in line with wikipedia's mission to prioritize making basic wikipedia use as low-barrier as possible for as many users as possible.

Robotbeat 6y ago
So I think Wikipedia's bar for use is pretty low. To bring it much lower (i.e. to Twitter or Facebook levels) might reduce quality because people will be more willing to make changes while requiring even less time investment. Wikipedia has wildly succeeded and mostly avoided the fate of other social media sites. We must tread very carefully to keep Wikipedia for future generations.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  So these particular changes are more about the UI for viewing/consuming content than editing/creating. And I'm suspicious of the theory that a harder to use UI for editing results in higher quality content. I understand your theory that some people who would edit content maliciously or without proper care would be put off by a harder to use UI, but it's not obvious to me that it's true, or that it wouldn't be countered by putting off even more people who would have good intentions and take proper care, some of whom correct malicious content. When making decisions for a site that millions use, you probably don't want to make significant strategic decisions, like to intentionally not make the UI as easy to use as you can, based on hunches. But anyway, wikipedians have actually had the opposite concern of yours for a while, rather than increasing to "too many" contributors, wikipedia seems to be losing contributors, and many see it as a problem. Both because you need enough contributors to maintain content, and because the self-image of wikipedia is that "anyone can edit", they actually want to make it accessible, not put barriers in the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_losing_contributors_-_Thinking_about_remedies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los... More info about who contributes to wikipedia is on the following page, which suggests about 132K users in the last 30 days. I don't know what the number is for how many users viewed wikipedia in the last 30 days but I'd guess far under 1% of wikipedia users make edits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...

drchopchop 6y ago

Wikipedia already contains a huge amount of "powerful" tools in the sidebar, that most casual users would never want to interact with. Upload file, recent changes, what links here, etc - pretty much all of these are irrelevant for people who aren't editors.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Except the whole point of Wikipedia is that everyone is potential an editor...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

kube-system 6y ago

I think the appropriate direction depends on your audience. Being powerful is often a trade off with accessibility.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

Tools meant to be used by laypeople need to make a good first impression. A mainframe-style UX where you have to type magic letters to trigger functions is great once you've gotten used to it, but the average user will not put in this effort and simply use something else instead (compare e.g. vim vs. nano). You can afford that sort of UX when you have users who don't have much of a choice and/or will spend a lot of time using that specific tool (which is why vim is still a thing). That's the case for e.g. airline booking systems for agents, not the case for airline booking websites for average users, and not the case for Wikipedia either. The best UX for this is a UX that is simple, yet still provides the advanced features, and ideally makes them discoverable. A classic example would be menus: You can either slowly click through the menu with the mouse, you see all the options, and you see the underlined letters that will allow you to navigate the menu much faster if this specific menu is worth learning. Additional visual clutter can be overwhelming, even to experienced users, especially if it's not well separated from the important stuff (it can simply make the important things harder to find - compare e.g. the toolbars of Google Slides and OpenOffice Impress). But good design can easily counteract this. For example, you could use a grey background on the unimportant stuff to let people focus on the important stuff. Which is why Wikipedia is doing. It's not as if the presence of that toolbar is going to distract someone from the only other task that can be done on the page, reading the article that takes up the entire rest of the screen...