8 ms·
Wikipedia redesign
- nathell 12y agoWhew. I was fearing this was yet another http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/ http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/ but fortunately I was wrong.
- gkoberger 12y agoWhile I 100% agree with the original article, this redesign actually isn't bad. They actually did a good job staying faithful to what makes Wikipedia important. That being said, I think sites like HN, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit, etc are iconically ugly rather than generically pretty -- and that's good.
- davidgerard 12y agoNo, it failed a pile of really obvious client requirements: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August/121650.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August... This is the page where we try to be polite about designers' crappy redesigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...
- tomek_zemla 12y agoI think it is always such a difficult design decision when to leave a popular site as is i.e. 'ugly' and when to introduce some improvements. While I agree with the general comments here that any redesign to giants like Wikipedia, HN, etc, should be really thought out carefully, it is also difficult to believe that there is no room for improvement! Do all these sites really have such amazing interfaces that should not be touched?
- peterchon 12y agothe last paragraph should be a required reading for all designers.
- tptacek 12y agoWikipedia seems like it would be one of the very hardest challenges for a portfolio project. That's because Wikipedia is almost certain to be around 50 years from now. We don't think about it all that often, because we live our lives in its presence, sort of like the people in Rome who live near the Colosseum probably spend most of their days seeing it as just another big stone building. I wouldn't want to be the architect proposing gleaming flowing metal facades and LED screens for the Colosseum, either. Whatever you do to Wikipedia has to make sense not just today, in the way a magazine cover design might need to work as a valid UX and an on-trend design, but also 10, 20, 40 years from now. Wikipedia is conservative in a way that very few Internet sites are; they're the caretakers of something --- I feel weird writing this, and maybe I'm wrong, but here goes --- world-historically important.
- Osmium 12y agoThis seems especially true considering (a) how much web design has changed in the last few years due to mobile devices and the responsive web and (b) how unprepared we were for that change. I'm frequently reminded that the most readable and accessible (albeit, admittedly, boring) websites out there are ones that are just plain old-school HTML–no javascript, no CSS, or anything like that.
- madeofpalk 12y ago> I'm frequently reminded that the most readable [...] no CSS I doubt it. CSS can be a whole lot less than just fancy floats and parallax scrolling.
- jarrett 12y agoYep. Namely: typeface, font size, line height, margins, font color, background color. Those are some pretty basic properties you'll want to set for even the most minimal design. CSS is how you set them. (I suspect that almost nobody would want to use the browser defaults for all these values.)
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- ScottWhigham 12y agoIt took me a while to "get it" mostly b/c I've been conditioned to think this was going to actually be yet another Wikipedia redesign haha. In typically web scanning mode, I skipped over (what I thought was the image caption) I didn’t change anything because there is nothing to change. Or at least, not enough to prompt a complete graphical overhaul. Kudos - well played. I suppose we won't have to wait long for the "HN redesign" or "reddit redesign" variants either.
- DanBC 12y agoThere are plenty of HN redesign attempts. It seems that people like attempts to increase the size or spacing of the vote buttons which makes accidental downvotes harder. It seems lots of people dislike the reduced information density. Some of the redesigns use a lot of whitespace which can be nice but means you only have 10 stories on the front page. Currently the only thing I'd really like to see is some 80 character indicator for the title box on the submission page. That would mean that people could remove small unimportant parts to fit in the limit, ratherthan just chopping out perhaps important words.
- benaston 12y agoTotally agree. Good design sense appears to be incredibly rare, and it's unfortunate that major sites simply copy each other's designs resulting in UI trends not based on sound design, but fashion. See the pervasive fixed position header for a good example.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bryang 12y agothe best website design principles: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- Semaphor 12y agoOnly I have to resize my window to actually read the text. People always say just plain is great, but we live in a world in which many people now have bigger widescreen monitors. Sites like this work great on smaller screen and even mobile. But they are bad UX for big screen users.
- clarry 12y agoIt's laid out by the browser. You should blame the browser -- not the data it tries to display -- for its bad UX.
- gerbal 12y agoOne line of css to the head and it magically is a perfect website (though left aligned) body{ max-width:40em; }
- nandhp 12y ago> I have to resize my window to actually read the text [...] we live in a world in which many people now have bigger widescreen monitors I'm sorry, I just don't understand this whole "people have widescreen monitors, so designers need to decide how wide something should be" idea. "Because people have wider monitors than they used to" seems like a meaningless excuse to me, since windows have been resizable since Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in 1968 (more than 40 years ago). In my opinion, when you choose a size for your web browser, you are signaling to the webpage which region of your screen you would like to have filled with content. If your screen is too wide to read full-width text comfortably, you should just keep the web browser resized to 83% of your screen width (or whatever) instead of having it maximized all the time. Most web browsers will even remember your preference from one time to the next. Plus, if you do want something to fill your screen (and you don't use Mac OS) it's one click to maximize the window temporarily. Nothing's ever stopped designers from over-designing webpages (many people would point to scroll-to-animate webpages), but I really don't think that maximum width (or, worse, minimum width!) is some necessary thing for designers to dictate, since it's so easy for users to choose a width that's comfortable for them.
- nperez 12y agoThe comment about design features working only in the designer's context definitely rang a bell for me. The most common one for me is the section containing just enough space for the designer's sample text, which is conveniently very small. Fast-forward to the moment the design gets actually coded up, and we've got ellipsified text all over the place.
- thaumaturgy 12y agoOff-topic, but what happened to "www."? More and more sites recently seem to be going without a www subdomain. In this case, "www.jgthms.com" goes to a Gandi parking page. (!) In other cases, the connection simply times out or the server returns an error page.
- ceejayoz 12y agohttp://no-www.org/ http://no-www.org/
- twic 12y agoWe've also generated at least two direct competitors: http://yes-www.org - A site that suggests that all domains have www. subdomains http://extra-www.org - A site that suggests that all domains have two www. subdomains. (www.www.domain.com) Fantastic. That is old-school internet humour.
- verisimilitude 12y agoMy understanding is that the number of people who like leaving off the www exceeds the number who remember to redirect all requests correctly. I believe the nginx server block would read something like: server_name www.website.tld; rewrite ^ http://website.tld$request_uri? permanent;
- DonPellegrino 12y agoUse return instead of rewrite. server { listen 80; server_name www.website.tld; return 301 http://website.tld$request_uri; }
- scrollaway 12y agoPlease back up your claims with a reason - all you're giving us is a different way to do things here.
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- davidgerard 12y agoStandard reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign... tl;dr ideas are always welcome, but most redesigns ignore that the site is not US-only, English-only or Latin-only.
- Zikes 12y agohttp://wikipediaredefined.com/ http://wikipediaredefined.com/ Step 1: Toss out the globe covered in runes from languages from all around the world and just use the Latin W. Step 2: Remove or hide all languages except English from the home page, and hide the means to access those other languages under options and accessors written in English. Step 3: Replace or supplement menu items with graphic symbols likely only recognized or used in Western cultures. Step 4: Throw in a Share button because Social or whatever. Also include a Print button that likely only works in certain browsers because nobody knows how to use their browser's built-in Print button. Step 5: Install Frontpage on Wikipedia. Step 6: More colors and graphics. It's as if the article was written about this very redesign.
- DanBC 12y agoYou forgot the metastep of "designer choses to use a weird, ugly, font on their web page that reduces readability"
- gkya 12y agoI so concur! Thought they were writing “Jmagine” and “Jt” instead of “Imagine” and “It” to look cool or something.
- rhizome 12y agoIs that site serious or a parody?
- herokusaki 12y agoTo be fair, the front page is already there at http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/.
- gee_totes 12y agoI agree with the spirit of the article, and would like to add that the thing that bugs me about these Wikipedia re-designs is that none of these designers seem to know that it's quite easy to add your own CSS and restyle Wikipedia. I've been rocking my own Wikipedia theme for over a year now: https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia-theme https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia-theme
- davidgerard 12y agoThere's some work going on in MediaWiki to try to separate out theming stuff so that it's actually feasible to write a good theme. A big problem is that Vector, the default skin for MediaWiki and Wikipedia, half lives in an extension and not in the skins directory.
- return0 12y agoActually it seems they DID a redesign recently. The article title appears in Times instead of helvetica. (Edit: it's Georgia)
- awhitty 12y agoRelevant link: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh
- saltvedt 12y agoI agree strongly with this message. There is a lot more to web design than making a page "pretty". Wikipedias design is good; and certainly too good to justify a complete design overhaul. The biggest problem I have with it is the unclear visual hierarchy: there are links which are context dependent (changes depending on which article you're viewing) next to links which always link to the same page. And the list of languages the article is available in would benefit from listing the most viewed (or last used) versions before the full alphabetical listing.
- DanBC 12y ago> The thing is, there is in the long run no incentive to alter Wikipedia’s content and degrade its integrity. The collaborative authority will prevent it anyway. People don't need much incentive to do stupid things. There's not much incentive to toss trash out a car window rather than into a bin, but people do that every day. There's a bunch of mindless minor vandalism that happens on WP because of that. Some parts of WP are really horrible. Ignore all the obvious places (anything to do with Ireland or Northern Ireland; Israel and Palestine; Abortion; etc). But quiet gnomic uncontroversial edits can get mired up. Someone makes some good faith (and valid) changes to punctuation and spelling. They are quickly reverted by an overzealous twinkle user on "vandal patrol" (wikipedia has done a lot to stop this problem and that needs to be recognised) who also leaves a warning template. The newbie gnomic editor removes the template and reverts the article reversion, and is then receives multiple templates. I don't know how many people have a first experience of WP like that, or find it repeated if they try again, and it would be good to know. But the point of mentioning this is that the toxic parts of WP are a strong incentive to some people to "stick one over" to the WP community. Long term sleeper accounts making a variety of good edits with a few known bad edits; concern trolling; wiki-lawyering; etc. There are plenty of meta-wikipedia places where very long threads can draw in many users to spend a long time talking about stuff which is, at its core, nonsense. I suspect the future-people may find the meta stuff, especially comparing the meta stuff across different wikipedias, more interesting than actual WP.
- scrollaway 12y agoIts not about incentive for people who litter and vandalize, its about what the majority of people want. Otherwise, there would be more trash outside the bins than inside them. Thankfully, most places aren't like this.
- DanBC 12y agoI live in England. There is plenty of trash outside wastebins. Especially if you see the streets before the streetsweepers have been through. The fact that there exist specially designed and built vehicles to sweep pavements to clean them of litter, and these are supplemented by workers with hand push carts and litter picking sticks, shows some need for litter collection. Litter costs about £1bn per year and we're still a pretty dirty country. (I did notice on my visits to California that they were much cleaner. Partly that's about lack of rain, but also it's because people just don't drop as much litter.). Californians are usually surprised at just how dirty London is. David Sedaris hates litter. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r11wc http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r11wc
- NAFV_P 12y agoA very good example of website design [0]: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://news.ycombinator.com/news
- mangeletti 12y agoI agree with the author's thesis, that many designers design for aesthetics and not for usability, but I couldn't help but think that he did with this article exactly what he was shunning as useless, which is to address the design of Wikipedia to gain prominence, and all this without even the effort of opening Photoshop... the irony is terrific.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- josephschmoe 12y agoDoes anyone actually use the main page of Wikipedia? I just look it up on Google and a relevant article shows up. It's the same way I view stackoverflow.
- privong 12y agoIt's sometimes interesting to check to see recently added articles which are highlighted, "this day in history" items, as well as recent major news items which I might have missed.
- anthemcg 12y agoThis feels unnecessary. Everyone gets it: you can't actually redesign a website with a few random mock-ups and visual updates. That so often is not the point of an unsolicited redesign. Most of these people are young designers looking to practice, have fun or create something tangible to demonstrate some of their skills. Its clear that changing a button or making a visual change doesn't equate to UX expertise. However, for a lot of designers this material gets them attention and gives potential employers common context to evaluate them and maybe they are a UI designer who wants to display their visual skills. There are a lot of reasons to take it too seriously but I encourage young designers to do it. A redesign can help me evaluate certain skills in a junior candidate and they are fun to look at. Redesigning stuff is fun, who cares if you want enjoy yourself. So, I'm not sure who this for. Convincing a designer not to do a redesign of a website and post it on their blog? What's the harm? These redesigns don't actually change the industry understanding or perception enough to matter. We need to calm down and just enjoy these redesigns for what they are.
- tptacek 12y agoThere's no real harm, except potentially to the up-and-coming designer, who is signaling something about their design process by writing something like this. Wikipedia has a lot of design constraints that other sites don't have. A big part of the job of being a professional designer is discovering and navigating design constraints. So when you pick Wikipedia as your "bucket list" portfolio spec design example, you might want to be careful that you're not communicating something about your process (specifically: obliviousness) that you don't mean to communicate. Spec designs are fun to read and while I'm not a designer and have no business offering career advice to one, I'm happy to encourage people to keep doing them so I can keep reading and snipping at them. But there are safer targets to pick than Wikipedia.
- anthemcg 12y agoI have to agree that Wikipedia is not a good target for a redesign. Also, I don't think its on every designer's bucket list. But, Its fair to assume that a lot of people select Wikipedia specifically because it has such an uncommon set of constraints. To make assumptions about design process based on something like the choice to do a "redesign" of Wikipedia sounds generally useless : Especially coming from a junior designer who I guarantee is not thinking that hard about it. I am just saying : Everyone is getting way too serious about unsolicited redesigns. I think the article makes valid points about what design is and what defines user experience but It feels mean-spirited and the targeting at redesigns is mis-directed.
- gojomo 12y agoAspiring artists don't paint bowls of fruit because the world needs another painting of a bowl of fruit. Let people practice and show off their evolving craft.
- tucosan 12y agoI really don't see the problem here. Why shouldn't people try their hand with a wikipedia redesign? It's a great (and admittedly very hard) challenge. Which doesn't mean that people shouldn't keep trying. But maybe people should indeed hit for easier targets first - maybe they could offer bbx a redesign for his own blog? Looking at his copy text running all to the bottom of the page without any bottom space or even a footer https://imgur.com/bC3RuHv https://imgur.com/bC3RuHv I feel physical pain looking at his site. But what do I know? I'm just a designer...
- greenpizza13 12y agoDid you purposefully cut the bottom white space off to prove a point. IE, FF, and Chrome all render the space at the bottom.