Wikipedia:User experience feedback

Responding to your feedback

First of all, thanks to everyone for providing feedback on the recent changes [the Vector skin and editor improvements in 2010] to Wikipedia. We really appreciate the time everyone's taken to let us know their thoughts on the changes.

Rather than to respond to each post individually, we've consolidated our feedback to address the recurring issues:

BlackBerry

• Update: BlackBerry users should now be redirected to the mobile site by default. This should also address issues with older BlackBerries that could not display the new site layout. Please report if you are still experiencing BlackBerry issues.--Eloquence* 18:52, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Search

• Update: We've published a more detailed explanation regarding the new location of the search box.--Eloquence* 01:37, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
• Update: The search fixes have been deployed. You may need to bypass the browser cache by doing a shift-refresh. We hope the fix addresses the major concerns about search functionality. Howief (talk) 22:22, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
• Update: We're staging a fix of the search functionality here (one of the prototype sites). In addition to the increased width, this fix includes the allocation of more space to the auto-suggestions and the restoration of "Go" and "Search" functionality within the new interface. Howief (talk) 01:25, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
• Update: The width of the search box has been increased by approximately 56%, which also increases the width allocated for the auto-suggestions. We're still working on some different treatments of the auto-suggestions to better handle very long article names. Howief (talk) 20:12, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
• Update: The auto-suggest code causing the cut-off issues was rolled back over the weekend. You may need to press shift-refresh to bypass the browser cache to bypass the browser cache to get the fix to work. Howief (talk) 21:19, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
• We're aware of the bug (#23498) about the search terms being cut off. This is a serious issue. We're working on a fix right now and are hoping to have something over the next few days. Thanks to everyone for reporting this bug.

• We've deployed a fix so that the first tab on a page goes to the search box (rather than to the left nav). The first tab should bring the cursor to the search box (unless there are forms such as login, edit, etc.). This is the same behavior as found in Monobook.
• There are a number of comments that the new search box makes less of the search input viewable. We're experimenting with some different approaches to spacing to see if we can preserve the horizontal spacing.
• Quite a lot of you have mentioned frustration with the new location of the new search box. Based on our usability testing, the upper right corner was a more intuitive location for search for many users. In our first round of usability testing (conducted prior to any changes), users did not use the search box in the left nav. Rather, they repeatedly went to the search box in the upper right hand corner of the browser. In the second round of testing (which included the search change), none of the users had problems finding the search box in the new location (details here). As an example, there was one user who, when asked to search for something, instinctively found the search box in the upper right corner. When we asked this user if he'd noticed a change in the site, it took him a moment before he realized that the search box had changed locations -- he found the new location before consciously realizing it had changed. Nevertheless, we know this is a significant change for many users. We'd ask people to try out the new location for a bit before switching back.

Font size: Many users have reported that font sizes have become smaller in Vector. We're not sure why, but this is something we're looking into. Any additional info on this issue would be helpful in troubleshooting.

Does this help? -- Gabriel Wicke (talk) 18:46, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

r55333: Trevor Parscal set the bodyContent font-size at 0.8em; that's too small in my honest opinion. --Virgolette (talk) 00:02, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia shouldn't be changing the font size for the main text in the first place! The user has already chosen a default font size in the browser. Don't change that (for the main text of the page). -216.1.16.126 (talk) 23:41, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree. Especially _reducing_ the default font size, is very unwelcome.Mpvdm (talk) 19:59, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I second that. It was always so refreshing to have a site respect your font size preferences. Where can I more formally/profoundly express the importance of this font size issue?208.65.88.249 (talk) 17:47, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

The new font choice and size make wikipedia pages difficult to read. This is a very negative change from the previous format. Changing the font size in Internet Explorer 8 from medium to largest helps some but the new font is still difficult to read and work with using a 21" monitor (fairly large by usual standards) set at 1600 x 1200 resolution. By comparison, most web pages are easy to read and work with the font size in Internet Explorer 8 set to a default of medium.

Pages are slow: The team has worked hard to ensure that the new features do not result in a decrease in performance. The initial slowness may be due to the stress resulting from the skin switch. Once the switch has propagated to all of the caches (which should be the case by now), performance should return to normal. Also, initial page loads may be slow since the new javascript and CSS needs to be downloaded. After the initial download, things should be quicker as everything should be in the browser cache. Please leave comment if the slowness persists after a few days.

The pages are still very slow; I have seen no improvement here. It's quite irritating when reading pages but really maddening if you e.g. need to track changes and compare and browse a large number of different versions. Any user should be able to easily, i.e. without account and without logging in, disable at least any active content. Missing the old pages! --Sivullinen (talk) 15:43, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Issues with certain browsers: Our team works hard to support as many browsers as possible and does extensive cross-browser testing. Our priority is obviously to support the most popular browsers (and the most fully standard compliant browsers). Unfortunately, this means that some users of browsers with very small usage (comparatively) may not be fully supported at this time.

• We are aware of an issue where right-clicking on the tabs in supported versions of IE does not work properly (bug #23490). We are working on a fix, but there are a number of potential cascading consequences. We'll keep everyone posted.

Languages in the left nav: To simplify the look and feel of the page, we've put the languages in an expandable menu. The tradeoff is that users who want to view articles in multiple languages will have to expand the menu to view the other languages. But once the menu is expanded, it will remain so until it's collapsed. We felt this tradeoff made sense since the language links were used relatively infrequently based on tracking data and cost of to these users is relatively small (only one additional click is required -- if an additional click were required every time the feature is used, we would have chosen differently).

For those of you who would like to follow the bug-squashing, check out Bugzilla. Most of the bugs have been categorized as Usability Initiative bugs and Vector bugs (hopefully these links will work).

We'll continue working down the list of known issues. Thanks again for your feedback.

Howief (talk) 00:57, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Little Header modification to make it leaner.

I think the new header wastes too much space and doesn't looks entirely right. This little javascript script I made solves the problem:

right = document.getElementById("right-navigation");
right.style.setProperty("margin-right", "270px", "");
right.style.setProperty("margin-top", "0px", "");
document.getElementById("mw-head-base").style.setProperty("height", "40px", "");
document.getElementById("left-navigation").style.setProperty("top", "0px", "");
document.getElementById("p-personal").style.setProperty("top", "10px", "");

Try it out, writing this in the direction bar:

javascript:(function(){right = document.getElementById("right-navigation");right.style.setProperty("margin-right", "270px", "");right.style.setProperty("margin-top", "0px", "");document.getElementById("mw-head-base").style.setProperty("height", "40px", "");document.getElementById("left-navigation").style.setProperty("top", "0px", "");document.getElementById("p-personal").style.setProperty("top", "10px", "");})();

Suggestion: add button to save any Wikipedia page as a PDF file

I think this would be super useful and many users would appreciate it. There is already open source programs that can accomplish this quite easily. WDYT? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.93.172.48 (talk) 09:18, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

There is a print/export menu in the sidebar. --93.213.158.37 (talk) 20:33, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

New theme

This new theme is awful, it's like a mobile site. I have a 2560x1440 main monitor and it uses like a third of it for text. I tile windows to maximise space, I don't need a website making some decision about what#'s best for me and preventing me from reading at a comfortable information density. Please give us an option to revert. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.68.30.100 (talk) 14:12, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Please Correct

Ephraim's mother was black so he was NOT a white man. If you are concerned with accuracy then this should be corrected. Please fix the picture or remove it. Thank you. 2607:FB91:2CC6:91CF:F0D4:6486:DE6D:539C (talk) 16:43, 23 July 2023 (UTC)