A new look for Wikipedia
(Update 2: The search interface was updated on May 20. This update addresses the problems where search query is truncated under some circumstances, and the problem that search suggestion is cut-off. Thank you for your prompt feedback.)
(Update: We have received problem reports and feedback that search queries were truncated sometimes and the search suggestions were hard to read due to the limited width. In order to mitigate the problem, the new search function was disabled and the search field was increased by fifty percent. We also have updated the new search interface which we are currently staging on the prototype. This updates address the reported issues such as truncation of search queries and the problems that search suggestions are cut-off. Prototypes in various languages are also available here. Please try it out and let us know your feedback. Thanks!)
Wikipedia has some new improvements, thanks to the hard work and dedication of over half a million beta testers and volunteers who worked with the Wikimedia User Experience team over the last year! With a beta testing group of 635,000 people and an 83% user retention rate, we’re proud to introduce you to Wikipedia’s new look and feel. As of 8:00am UTC today, the new features moved from beta and will be available for everyone to use. This is the first major initiative the Wikimedia Foundation and its volunteers have ever undertaken for Wikipedia’s interface. And there’s more to come.
It’s been one year since we began the usability initiative, and we’ve rolled out the new interface to Wikinews (English and Serbian), Wikimedia Commons, and now English Wikipedia. That means that hundreds of millions of people around the world will now experience an easier to use, and more importantly, easier to edit Wikipedia. Our most recent interface launch, on Wikimedia Commons, was a great success with continued adoption by over 91% of Commons contributors. Over the next few weeks, the new interface will cascade to all language Wikipedias.
Here’s what’s new:
- Look and feel: We’ve introduced a new theme we call “Vector” which makes essential functions easier to find.
- Navigation: We’ve improved the navigation for reading and editing pages. Now, the tabs at the top of each page more clearly define whether you’re reading or editing a page. There’s also a collapsible navigation for the left sidebar that hides items that aren’t used often, but allows them to continue to be easily accessible.
- Editing improvements: We’ve reorganized the editing toolbar to make it easier to use. Now, formatting pages is simpler and more intuitive. And we’ve introduced a table wizard to make creating tables easier. You’ll also discover a new find and replace feature to simplify page editing.
- Link wizard: An easy-to-use tool allows you to add links to other pages on Wikipedia, or to pages on external sites.
- Search improvements: Search suggestions are now improved to get you to the page you are looking for more quickly.
- Pediapress book creator: Create a printed book by selecting Wikipedia articles and adding them to the Book Creator. Your articles will be turned into a PDF (or OpenDocument) file so you can easily take Wikipedia wherever you go.
- Updated Puzzle globe and wordmark: The well-known Wikipedia globe and wordmark have been enhanced and improved. We’ve introduced Linux Libertine, an open source typeface to help support the creation of hundreds of localized Wikipedia wordmarks, and the internationally-recognized puzzle globe has been recreated in 3D and includes even more languages. Read more from our recent blog post.
We kicked off this effort in April 2009, and immediately went to work to figure out how to make Wikipedia easier to use for everyone. We started with usability testing among everyday readers with no editing experience, and we learned about the way people interact with Wikipedia and how we could make the experience better. Using this valuable information, we incrementally released new features to users who opted into our beta testing group. Over the next several months, we continued to improve the features based on feedback from both our beta testers and from usability studies we conducted. We’re thankful for the input of thousands of international users and volunteers who gave us feedback on our progress.
During our initial beta testing phases, 81% of Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia beta participants kept using the new editing interface. Seventy to seventy-nine percent of German, Russian, Chinese, French and Italian Wikipedia beta users also maintained the new interface. Retention rates for Polish and Japanese were relatively low in the beginning (65% and 60%, respectively). Since then, we used feedback directly from our users all over the world to increase the quality of the interface and design.
If you prefer the classic interface, called monobook (without the enhancements), don’t worry, you can click on the “Take me back” link at the top of the page to go back to the previous interface. You’ll also be able to return to monobook interface whenever you’d like.
With the support of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and the generous support from organizations like the Stanton Foundation, we’re making our projects easier for people from all parts of the world to contribute and access high-quality free educational information, which is central to our mission here at the Wikimedia Foundation.
This isn’t the only project we plan to release to make it easier to use Wikipedia, and all of our Wikimedia projects; it’s just the first. We’ve built an FAQ and feedback page which we encourage you to use — any feedback is valuable and will help us make our projects better.
We’d like to thank the many volunteers who have supported the User Experience team since this project began, as well as the Foundation’s donors and supporters.
Naoko Komura, Head of User Experience Programs
Many folks complaining about the search box. One person defending it because Facebook and YouTube uses it. Arbitrarily moving the search box and assuming the millions who use Wikipedia would agree is disappointing. At the very least, make that feature customizable, so users can park it where they want it.
I like the new website in general, but please move the search box back. It seems much more intuitive to have it on the left where you first look at the site, not squeezed into the top corner.
Too much space is wasted on the top of the page. The light-blue borders and the blue gradient don’t look fine. The icons for “page-lock”, “listen” look awful.
Please revert the layout until the new one receives serious polishment.
Most changes look good, but I liked the searchbox where it was. Put it in both places if you want to, but search is important — almost all of my Wikipedia usage starts with typing in that box.
If most users are like me (I don’t know if they are or not), they hover their cursor over the article when reading. Moving the search box to above the content from its previous place beside it means that users who do hover their mice in this way will have to move farther to get to the search.
Even if that is not true for most users, there’s something (a great deal) to be said for the stored up muscle memory of where one moves the cursor to accomplish certain tasks on certain sites: all the the memory of all of the users of Wikipedia has just been undermined by this change.
For these reasons, I do not think the move of the search box was a useful change.
Uh, just no. Why everything changes for ‘flashy-things’ and graphics?
Good it’s just a skin, so back to older, better layout for me!
But it’s good to know that Wikipedia evolves with each day. Cheers!
Move the search box back where it was, on the left side. It makes no sense for it to be where you put it.
There seems to be a serious bug in the new editing software. Every time I type something into a particular line in the editing box, the software scrolls the text down, so that that line becomes the lowest line in that box. Consequently, it is now impossible to read lines lower than the line you’re editing while you’re actually doing the editing. It’s just so annoying that it must mean there’s something wrong. Please fix the bug before it makes me go mad!!
The new logo is really bad. And the search box is far too small. Extend the beta.
This change made Wikipedia almost unusable on all but one of my computers. The font size seems to be specified in physical units so that the characters become unrecognizable clumps of pixels if the pixels are not small enough. Only the tiny screen of my netbook computer has small enough pixels (146 dpi) to render those fonts properly.
The guy who decided to move the search box should be fired immediately and banished from the IT industry forever! Actually, I doubt that he could even work as a janitor. He would probably empty the trash cans into the file cabinets or something.
Man, you just destroyed your whole site!
For everyone discussing the location of the search box…
Without wishing to second guess the good work done by the Wikipedia team, I suspect its there because that’s the place almost every website puts search. So for the vast majority of users, especially those not highly experienced on wikipedia, that’s where people look to search.I’ve carried out many user testing sessions, and that’s where users’ eyes and mice go when they decide to search – Its a standard design pattern to which users’ brains, eyes and mice are pre-programmed.
And don’t forget a LOT of testing has been carried out on these revisions to the website!
Having said all that, personally I’d go for a big search box on the front page as well by the way, as if you arrive there then you will generally want to search. Its the primary task, so should be the primary interface element.
And to those who just hate it; It is pretty standard that highly experienced users of a website hate it when things are changed – this kind of change is often aimed at less experienced users, while trying to not upset the experts and help them out to, and I’m sure this is no different… They are I’m sure trying to broaden the appeal to wikipedia as a reference, and also to encourage more people to contribute, and I’d like to think that those of you who use this all the time would accept a temporary inconvenience as your brain re-wires itself or these reasons ;-)
But I have not been involved – just trying to pass on the POV of a UX designer who does this stuff (and hears these ‘discussions’) all the time!
I absolutely HATE it, and can’t understand why it wasn’t simply introduced as a new optional skin rather than a default interface. I’ve always kept my search suggestions disabled anyway, and have never used (or had much use for) the editing-toolbar, so I severely lack interest in any enhancements that may be made to items as such… well, unless someone wants to add an engvar-friendly spell checker that is. I fail to see any “functional” enhancement whatsoever… just lots of slow loading pages with a few aesthetic changes and lots of awkward relocation of items that never needed to be shuffled. It’s about as exciting as adding graphical smiley support to an instant messenger. Sure, some people may find that cute, but it doesn’t allow them to be any more productive.
Want to impress me? Start displaying all links to disambiguation pages in their own unique colour, and diffs with highly-visibile coloured text-highlighting applied to anything that’s changed… including chunks of altered whitespace that the current diffs tend to conceal.
What the heck..?! I looked and looked for a Search box… when I found it, wasn’t sure if it was “it”. What, you’re paying obeisance to an oriental system of right to left reading? I dislike the new look, because when I visit, I feel as if an old friend has moved out, but hey, I won’t belittle your creative efforts to find a new look. But I DO complain about the location of the Search box. PUT IT LEFT and HIGH. Thanks!
Most of the changes are fine, but the default font size is now way too small, as others have mentioned. Was there really a need to mess with this? Were people complaining that the old font was just too large? Please revert the stylesheet to the previous, legible font size.
Please return the search box to the left.
BREAKAGE ALERT: the selections on the left navigation bar (Interaction, Toolbox, Print/export, Languages) do not function in two of the browsers I use heavily (Konqueror and the Mozilla Suite Browser). Javascript is tricky and hard to get right.
Re. the search-box move: in most other sites, search is a ancillary function–nice to have but not vital. In Wikipedia, though, search is one of the most fundamental functions. It is a central feature of the website; the search box needs to be prominent.
I can live with a “cleaned up” left navigation bar, but the language list needs to come back to the default display. There are two reasons why everyone should see this: 1. one gets an indication of the importance of a given topic in other parts of the world from the list of languages displayed for that topic, and, more importantly, 2. it helps us remember that we live in a world with many cultures. Those links are invitations to look to other languages; they need to be visible.
Contrary to Tgr’s comment (#17 in the list above), removing the label from the search field was a bad idea. We were better off with labelled buttons for “Go” and “Search”.
Making us log in to go back to the old look is onerous. Persistent cookies with theme-preference settings would be better. Wikipedia is, and should remain as, a site where it is not necessary to log into to read.
Editing improvements are of no great interest to me. I use MediaWiki markup all the time at work. If I could set up per-page stylesheets, I’d find the change helpful; but as it is, the new graphical tools don’t offer much to me.
Any time I try to access any Wikipedia page on my Blackberry browser, it loads almost all of it, then crashes the browser with “A problem occurred while trying to render the page”.
Please put the search box back on the left-hand side of the page, and MAKE IT BIGGER!
It’s far too small (and inconspicuous) now. Thank you!
Please please don’t dick with the formatting
Everytime you screw around like this it imposes a $100 million tax on your
users. Where did the search box go? Where is the option for X? I knew
where it was before. Figure
2 million users * 15 minutes confusion time * $20/hour = $100 million
And this assigns most peoples time valued at zero!
In fact here’s a fund raising idea for you. Threaten that if your pledge
goals aren’t reached by a specified date, you’ll make … random changes
to the screen layout and formatting.