Last modified: 2012-12-13 19:08:35 UTC
Created attachment 4815 [details] Image of my watchlist on my laptop While the UI for pages like Special:Watchlist is completely functional the layout and design of said UI is beginning to show it's age. Functionality has been added over time without going back and making sure all special pages follow a theme or are laid out well. For example displaying Special:Watchlist on my laptop, the header portion takes up over 50% of the available space inside of the boxed area (see attachment). The special pages as a group do not follow the same standard at all. I think it is probably worth having someone who is a UI designer take a look at the useablity of the UI. Here are just a few examples that I found in a few minutes: *Special:Contributions has a group box at the top, contributions, watchlist etc do not. *The history page has help links in the title, other pages don't, the formatting is slightly different here as well *The fileupload page is totally different *Special:WhatLinksHere has a random "back" link that is unlabeled at the top (I have seen several users click that link the second they get to that page) *Special:Contributions vs Special:Watchlist : (for Ravedave) vs For Ravedave (Talk | Block log | Logs) *Weird combinations of controls Example: Special:WhatLinksHere has a dropdown for namespaces with a Go button, but below that are "Hide Tranclusions" etc that could be checkboxes above with the go button. * Special:WhatLinksHere, there is random grey text that says: "(List of links)", unlike other pages. *Pages for images are a weird mismash of information, and is again different from other pages (for example the history list is totally different from article history listings)
Adding myself to the CC on this, as I would love to see the UI cleaned up over time (and I am the last person to personally do it, you don't want to see my mockups). I was telling ravedave on IRC about having read some blog posts, etc about the subject of the MW UI. I can't seem to find them at the moment, but I'll try to dig them up over the next few days. Also, making this part of the tracking bugs, as this will probably track a lot of individual changes itself.
Is anything coming out of this? Can the usability team have a peek or are they already hands full?
The Usability team has targeted cleaning up the user interface, specifically the edit window, which tends to be very cluttered, but I'm sure they're try to touch other places around MediaWiki as needed.
Getting the Mediawiki community to draft some standards for UI components would help in clarifying the goal.
Since the WMF has a feature team, is there any point in keeping this bug around?
What's the connection between feature team and this?
Brandon "jorm" Harris is maintaining some design pages at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Style_guide There are also some internal mockup for better changes lists. So to me, the bug is already receiving attention and will get fixed by the design project. Hence I am not sure there is any point in keeping this bug report idling around.
I'm not sure I agree with you. Bug tracker is used for keeping track of bugs. If we close this bug, it may as well not exist anymore.
