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

The logo of the project by Kooky. Green represents the user, the three branches represent the web of information Wikipedia provides, and the middle path is the clearest, the one the project strives for. The shape recalls a blooming flower and the Wikimedia logo, as well.

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

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)reply

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

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