Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to try the new skin ‘Vector‘ that the Usability Team has implemented as part of our first release, also known as Acai!  If you haven’t yet, we invite you to check it out by going to Appearance > Skin in your preferences and selecting ‘Vector’.  As you play with the new skin and enhanced toolbar, the Usability Team is looking forward to our next release – codename Babaco – the next alphabetical tropical fruit in what we expect to be a delicious series.

We hope to continue adding features to enhance the editing process – including but not limited to further toolbar enhancements; dialogs for the creation of links, tables, and references; and tools to aid in navigation of article content during editing.  Our research, design, and development depends on feedback from users, community members, and interested parties like you.  We invite you to take a look at our work and if you have any opinions, praise, concerns, or criticism, please let us know here.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Parul Vora, Wikimedia Usability Initiative

The usability team has been translating the usability study into a new design and software for the last four weeks. The current focus is to implement easy improvement to overall usage of Wikipedia with the focus of editing interface in the next three months. The proposed skin by the usability team, Vector, will have streamlined tab layout, so that users will not lose the state of reading or editing whether in articles or in discussion pages.

Another usability improvement we are working on is the action-grouped toolbar, which hides the overwhelming number of tool icons which are not being used by novice users, but they are available for power users in the expanded mode. Lots of clutters will be removed from the editing interface.

You can see some of design mock-ups from our project page. Some of these proposed design concepts will be staged at the prototype environments this month and for any future improvements. (The action-based tool bar will not be seen on prototypes till June 8.)

If all goes well, these new features will be available from a user preference configuration early July. In the subsequent release in August, additional navigation aids are in the plan. We will be sharing the product feature at our project page in coming weeks. We look forward to your feedback.

Naoko Komura
The Wikipedia Usability Team

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)

Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative