On 05/20/2010 01:13 AM, Charles Matthews wrote: > Ah, but it would be "confusing" to be out of step with other websites, > wouldn't it? Never mind that Wikipedia is sui generis and well known in > its own terms, it would be "confusing" not to conform to other sites in > having design imposed, not bubbling up from the community of editors > (who admittedly only make the site what it is).
I hate to tell you this, but people working on every site believe theirs is so special that it should be an exception the rules. But however awesome a site is, regular users spend most of their time on other sites. That's true even for a high-traffic site like ours. So we should only deviate from conventions or make innovative design choices when there is such a clear benefit to users that it outweighs the cost to our users. The community of editors definitely make this place what it is, but our shared goal is to serve readers, and I think that should be paramount in our minds. Especially in situations like interface design, where a classic and incredibly common mistake is for internal stakeholders to make self-serving choices. That's not to say that we shouldn't also design for expert users. For example, I agree with others that there should be some way for experts to easily do a text search without having to make the extra click. But assuming a 99:1 novice to expert ratio for our traffic, the current approach must have saved an awful lot of extra clicks from novices. William _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
