This weekend, I found myself—through the execution of what seemed like an easy challenge for my book—thrust into redesigning a Wikipedia page. In the process, I was dumbfounded by how many usability and visual consistency issues there are in the Wikipedia interface.
We spend a ton of time querying the Internet for details about everything from where President Obama was born to who directed the third episode of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And more often than not, we're interested in the facts we're uncovering, not how the facts are presented to us. This is a shame, because there are major improvements that can be made by designers to how we present factual content that's meant to be consumed through the Internet.
Other sites, such as Usability Post, have done a thorough job of documenting a number of the major issues with the old interface, so I spent an hour correcting some of them in a visually pleasing fashion to show how, with a minimum of effort, a coalition of designers could rethink some of the key interactions on Wikipedia.
Recent Comments