Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability

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The Wikipedia Usability Project aims to make Wikipedia easier for everyone to use.

This group's goal was to promote the application of usability best practices and/or web usability. Many other projects focus on the content of Wikipedia; this project focused on the presentation of that content. The group was active from about 2005 to 2010.

Especially in 2009 and 2010, much of the work coordinated with Wikimedia Foundation staff at the usability: wiki. Among other things, this group's work informed the creation of the Vector 2010 skin.

Issues

This project hopes to make Wikipedia easy and pleasant to use by applying itself to the following areas:

• Being intuitive - contents made understandable by everyone; using familiar and affordance interface design for universal usability
• Architecture - Organisation of information.
• Design - Visual appearance of Wikipedia; making it "easy on the eyes", and standardized (all things of a certain type should appear in the same form).
• Interface - Making editing and other interactions easier.
• Compatibility - Cross-browser support; ease of use for everyone on any device and any browser
• Standards and accessibility - making use of W3C-recommended XHTML and CSS in a manner that promotes the above and accessibility
• Speed - loading time of Wikipedia page (yet to be added area)

Past projects

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Reducing interface complexity
• Usability Initiative
• FAQ for the new Vector skin user interface
• Community Portal redesign
• Help page redesign
• Main Page redesign (related discussions)

Ideas for projects

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Future projects for ideas.

Queries

• Wikipedia talk:Community Portal#Request - "is there no way to get a better interface? most people have javascript its just that its all so very confusing- maybe that is supposed to put most people off? NO indication where one is supposed to join up/post/ pages and pages....protocols... and all the jargon offputting. you need to attract people who don't necessarily have computer knowledge but subject knowledge you should make it easy for eg. my grandfather, who is an expert on aviation history to contribute to this online resource- its all so very confusing!!!!!"
• At Talk:Isotope table (complete) we are debating a proposal by User:Greg L to put the article's full isotope table, and Isotope table (divided)'s table, in a single larger article. Much of the argument is about usability, as well as performance. Input from the Usability project might be useful. --JWB (talk) 16:49, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Sub-pages

• /Color - use of color in Wikipedia
• /Color Tabs - side tabs for browsing (color coded)
• /Sizing examples - browser width and image size
• /HTML - use of HTML and CSS in Wikipedia
• /Images - images in Wikipedia articles
• /Notices - notices, boxes, and other "meta" elements
• /MediaWiki - key MediaWiki pages/interface parts

Templates

• {{WikiProject Usability}} - project banner (mostly for the talk pages of templates that serve usability functions, as well as pages having to do with usability issues)
• {{User WikiProject Usability}} - user box to "advertise" your participation in the project.
• {{The Usability Barnstar|put your message here ~~~~}}

Participants

If you'd like to join (please do!), add yourself and optionally your areas of interest/expertise to the list of participants. Feel free to add {{User WPUsability}} to your list of userboxes.

• /Participants

Listing yourself does not obligate you to do anything. This section serves primarily as a gauge of project interest, and to provide links to users who may be contacted in regards to this WikiProject, their interests, or usability in general.

See also

Articles:

• Computer accessibility
• Web accessibility
• Usability
• Web usability

Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia:Accessibility
• Wikipedia:Guide to layout
• Wikipedia:Template standardisation
• Wikipedia:Article size suggests 32k ceiling
• Wikipedia:Colours
• Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes

WikiProjects:

• WikiProject Accessibility
• Wikipedia:Help Project
• WikiProject Check Wikipedia
• WikiProject Human–Computer Interaction

Proposals:

• Proposal for Table: namespace and intuitive table editor
• Automatic edit summaries (see also Bug 2437)

Other:

• m:Usability and m:Usability design group on Meta
• German Wikipedia - usability study (February 2006)
• German Wikipedia - usability study (external PDF)
• Wikipedia on OpenUsability at the Wayback Machine (archived February 6, 2007)

External links

• Wikimedia Design, including the Wikimedia Style Guide