Over the last year and a half, I’ve been dealing with our selection of UIBs quite a bit. I built the subpages for UIBs and standardized and simplified our UIB database so it’s readable and understandable for many. However, throughout the last few months, I came to notice there are some troubles in spacing. While it does impact our sizes, it’s not too bad, but does need more extensive work to fix and implement.
Trouble #1
: Even when the |id pic is set to 40px, some UIBs (which are often too tall) tend to elongate so UIBs often don’t line up well and some UIBs are taller
than others when UIB |info’s texts are to their simplest form.
Now, while they still display wherever they are used, this makes for jigsawed-together UIB pages that tend to be lengthier for some than others…
But I feel that if we find less-tall |id images, we can bring their height down and better fit these pieces together. Although I have not yet put together the complete list of these troubling UIBs which show working UIBs on the outside, but are troubling vertically
. Over the weekend, I’ll look into putting together the longer list to get the ball rolling.
Trouble #1b
: On the flip side, using images that are geared from Wikivisual’s pixelations are often too squinty to see and read, and don’t present the best images to use on the UIB. The image tends to push to the right outside of the |id’s border section and pushes the info section right. Also, as used on a UIB from the current Wikivisual pixelated images don’t use the standard vertical centering alignment making for some awkward-looking pic positions.
Also, Wikivisual images from these pixeled images tend to look too small to see in such a space, yet there are very few non-Wikivisual images that fit a UIB that don’t cause troubles when vertical size is at stake.
Also, I’ve found some other issues.
Trouble #2
: The second trouble is the lengthiness of our User Fluency UIBs and subcats of User Fluency - except our English ones. As per standards, we use the language-translated versions of our English UIB texts and then mention what that stands for in English. However, that most often elongates the box vertically too. Can we devise another - simpler way - to less constrain the vertical height of these, remove the original (untranslated) text (especially since this is the English version of wikiHow), and cut it back so that it’s not so tall?
Trouble #3
: The third trouble deals with the lengthiness of our User Team UIBs - or at least a good majority of them and might be something I’m going to further look into sooner. With User Team UIBs, we use the format " This author is a member of the (Project/team name with a link to the project page) and hopes you’ll join, too." However, we may need to cut out the “and hopes you’ll join, too” since it’ll be evident to the User whether or not they want to join and is rather excessive/superfluous. Also, displaying Team UIBs tends to promote the project even without that text inuse, and can be easily removed for simplicity. There are probably other ways of cutting down these UIBs further, but I’m not 100% sure how much better these can/will get.
Trouble #4
: I know I do this (sometimes too). I used to do this more, but not as much now. Too much text in the |id field lengthens the |id box and makes the |id box’s size not line up with all the others. However, cutting back on text - which seems to be an option - seems not like something doable in some cases where there are few choices for images for the box.
So how should we rectify this? It’s clear there are issues with spacing and length in our UIBs. We need to rethink image choices, simplify text, and trim unnecessary phrases to create more uniform and concise UIBs.
