Wiktionary talk:Usability

Discussion

Usability

Though layout may be the major hindrance to usability, there are others (incompetent search, lack of images for rare glyphs, etc.). Should this page be expanded to encompass these decisions, or should they take place elsewhere (sporadically through WT:BP)?--Bequw → ¢ • τ 21:49, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

This was a ship of no return for discussions that rarely get much interest. Usability seems too much like work to most folks, it seems. If you would like to start a usability page, moving this might be a start. BTW do you get the Nielsen-Norman Group alert box e-mail. Here is this week's. DCDuring TALK 22:14, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Horizontal lists

There's an interesting idea at wikipedia about horizontal lists. Basically, instead of delimiting elements in a horizontal list with commas (or middots), one wraps a standard vertical list with w:Template:Flatlist and it comes out horizontal with vertical border-lines as delimiters. Apparently this is better for screen-readers but annoying for sighted people (the vertical line makes lists with elements like "Lill" hard to follow, and it also isn't copy-&-paste-able). Not sure if there's an interest for it here. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 00:33, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

This is how the auto-generated indexes work, but with some extra CSS to try and make the columns line up. It may be possible as an alternative to simply use whitespace as an implicit delimeter, which can look very aesthetic providing the space is wide enough to not be a word-break, but still narrow enough to read as though it were prose, something like:

coal mine    collier    coalmine    coal dust    black coal    white coal

If a pale underline is present, the space can be made narrower, but this might confuse people who wonder what the underline means (given that the rest of the wiki does not have just a decoration - that said, I think DCDuring recently mentioned a desire to apply some kind of formatting to make links to multiword terms clearer in the inflection line, so maybe we should consider it)

coal mine   collier   coal dust   black coal

Both can be implemented for lists in CSS, as w:Template:Flatlist does (we can even ensure that line breaks always happen in the between-terms space).

Dreaming on, if we could ignore nasty browsers (cough IE), it would be possible to create the appearance of a normal "a, b, c, d" list in pure CSS. Conrad.Irwin 01:03, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

So do you think we should do this for =See also= lists such as {{mul-script/Latn-list}} , {{Thai-digits}}, {{hu-days}}, and {{is-months}}? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 05:54, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I've made {{flatlist}} for people to play with (there's no CSS in Commons.css so you'll have to use user-CSS until it can be more stable). --Bequw → τ 21:53, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

I've made up a CSS style (see my vector.css) that makes it a comma separated list in modern browsers (latest versions of FF, Chrome, and IE) and in older versions of IE it will just use padding to separate the items (using a CSS Filter). Any problems with this? If it seems to work I'll add the lines to Commons.css so that {{flatlist}} can be used "in the wild". --Bequw → τ 01:26, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

See w:WP:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-21/Technology_report for a new approach to horizontal lists taken at enwp. --Bequw → τ 03:30, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Mobile browsers

Has anyone tried viewing Wiktionary from a modern mobile browser (eg iPhone or an Android-based phone)? Are there any major problems or ways that the site can be made to better target mobile phones? --Bequw → τ 21:27, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Usability, shmusability

Not a topic of great interest, apparently. I think we basically believe that if we active contributors make sure our needs are addressed, that normal folks' needs will thereby be taken care of. Of course, this is extremely unlikely. DCDuring (talk) 20:10, 2 January 2024 (UTC)