New watch/unwatch and cascading tabs

Thanks for trying out the usability beta. Close to 280,000 people tried out the usability beta and about 220,000 people continue using it. One of the most-frequently reported frustration about the beta was that (1) watch/unwatch was hidden under the drop-down menu and (2) tabs overlaps when the browser is scaled down or the resolution is low. Tab issues were more significant for language communities whose words tend to be long such as German. We are also simplifying the search box to simplify the interface and in order to minimize the overlapping side-effect. Those new features are currently staged on the prototype wikis in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, Serbian, Russian, and Sinhala. You need to log-in in order to see watch/unwatch tabs. The screenshot on the right is the shot when the browser window is scaled down to 640×480. “View History” is moved to drop down menu in order to keep “Read” and “Edit” tabs visible. Let us know your feedback here.

Naoko Komura, Project Manager, Usability Initiative

Update on November 18th: Thank you for your support and feedback. These features are now available in the usability beta across all Wikimedia projects.

The first usability release, Acai, hit Wikipedia and sister projects this afternoon. The new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar can be turned on from the user preference under “Appearance” and “Editing”. Search result page now has a new layout with less daunting information. Vector is only available for left-to-right languages at a moment due to IE6 incompatibility. However, the enhanced toolbar can be selected from all languages and the new search result page is enabled globally. We could not roll out two features we had planned. First, warning messages for unsaved changes when a user switches away from the edit tab did not work properly thus they are disabled. So please be careful when you switch away from the edit tab. Secondly importing language specific configuration for special characters were not graceful, so we disabled special character function from the toolbar. We are working on the fixes and plan to roll them out as soon as we have stable solutions. The usability project wiki has Vector and the new toolbar as a default, so if you prefer to check them out without changing your preferences it is a good place to visit first. Let us know what you think. We would love to hear from you.

Best,

Naoko

Screenshot of enhanced toolbar

I am happy to announce that the first set of usability improvements is scheduled to be integrated in MediaWiki and will be enabled as one of user preferences in Wikipedia in the first week of July. The nickname for this release is called Acai. The release names will follow the names of tropical fruits in alphabetical order. The description of features are found in this release page. The major improvements are; 1) reorganized tabs which clearly indicates the state of “Read” and “Edit”, 2) enhanced edit toolbar which is expandable based on users’ needs, 3) search result page which hides the clutter and make search results more visible, and etc. We are still combating with IE6 bugs , but come and play with the prototypes and let us know your feedback. On the localization front, we have introduced a set of new texts for localization. If you are a MediaWiki translator, your collaboration on localization is greatly appreciated as always.

Naoko Komura

Wikipedia Usability Initiative