[pmwiki-users] It's time to change pmwiki default skin!
Petko Yotov
5ko at 5ko.fr
Tue Sep 13 08:17:44 CDT 2011
On Monday 12 September 2011 22:19:04, Forgeot Eric wrote :
> The drupal website is using blue link, but with a different color than the
> blue which was common during the geocities era: the design is classy and
> elegant, yet it's simple
For me the Geocities era was more about blinking and scrolling text, animated
GIFs, tiled background images and lots of "under construction" and "optimized
for MSIE" signs. :-)
I'll only comment on colored underlined links. I mostly agree that we could
improve the homepage and the documentation.
Contrary to what has been said, the default PmWiki skin does *not* force the
color or the decoration of links, visitors can configure their browsers to
show the links the way they prefer seeing links.
There are many usability studies about how people behave on a website or
intranet=wiki. By "people" I mean normal readers and editors who have some
ordinary task (find a specific information or change some text), neither site
admins, nor style designers, nor top users very experienced with the software
or the website structure. It might be interesting for a site owner, for an
admin or for a skin designer to keep themselves informed about the findings of
these studies, for example:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
Links need to be easily differentiated from other text, this is a usability
need and also common sense if you know how people read. It is acceptable to
have undecorated links in menus, sidebars and lists of links, but in a page
body it should be clear what is a link:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html
(This was observed in 2004, and our eyes and brains haven't evolved too much
since then.)
The "underlined" part is not a requirement but it is recommended as it is
helpful for color-blind users, users with lower vision, or just older people
like most of us become every day.
People do not read web pages like they read printed text. People "scan" a web
page looking for keywords, and those keywords are the first 2-3 words of a
paragraph, bold or italic words, and links.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
While this was written in 1997, today with thousands if not millions *times*
more websites, with better search engines, with information overload, lack of
time and more experience or habit of the internet, users read even less today
than in 1997. These conclusions are still current, even more accented, as you
can see in publications about more recent studies, eg. this from 2008:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html
> http://drupal.org/documentation/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook
>
> The same goes for this localized version: http://drupalfr.org/documentation
Both these documentation sites have a defect: visited and unvisited links look
the same way. This is a major usability problem, especially for large sites
(lots of pages, lot of information) and the Top 3 worse design mistake of all
times. When people search for something, if they don't know which pages they
have already visited, they turn in circles, visiting the same pages again and
again, and getting frustrated.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040503.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
> There are some trends in webdesign. It's not a shame to follow them,
> especially for a publishing tool. The current design is at least 6 year
> old: http://web.archive.org/web/20050913023010/http://pmwiki.org/
It would be a shame if following a fashion kills function and usability both
for editors and for readers. But I'd think it was caused by ignorance (lack of
information or lack of interest) rather than, say, stupidity. It is fixable.
Petko
P.S. I've been involved with a quite large wiki community (50-200 experienced,
intelligent editors active weekly, 100K+ pages, thousands of readers). Since
2003 the links were like on pmwiki, browser-default which in most browsers is
underlined and blue. Every once in a while, a newcomer editor or even a
visitor (this is a fairly democratic community) comes to tell us that he
doesn't like underlined links and that we are retarded to use them. The
community rejected by a vote one proposition to force non-underlined links,
and we also held a poll open to editors and to readers and the results were
not conclusive: most active editors stated that they preferred underlined
links, and about half of the unregistered visitors who voted too.
I should add that last year the site owner unilaterally and without consulting
the community (or the web usability guidelines) changed the default skin and
links now are no longer underlined. But as editors can set in their personal
preferences underlined links, and even switch back to the old skin, nobody
bothered to organize a protest or another vote. :-)
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