Anna
1
The folks at this year’s meetup got a little sneak peek of a change that’s going live today - a fancy new redesign of the category pages!
Back when wikiHow got its last big redesign, several years ago, we didn’t have a lot of engineering bandwidth to fine-tune and optimize the design of category pages. The result was an interface that was navigable for logged-in editors but didn’t always provide the best browsing experience, particularly for logged-out readers. For example, when a broad top category had lots of subcategories but few articles in it, the reader would land on a category that looked almost empty. In some categories, it was actually pretty hard to see what to click to find helpful article! It also risked making it look to search engines like our categories were pretty empty, which isn’t good for wikiHow’s standing on the web.
Basically, categories were overdue for a face lift! This project involved a bunch of teamwork by various folks at the wikiHaus, a ton of conscientious engineering by @Bsteudel
, and a fair amount of input based on good questions asked by community members at the meetup. The result is hopefully rolling out today! It’s still a work in progress with some tweaks still to be made and some bugs to be ironed out, but it’s pretty rad to see the basics going live.
Once it’s live, check it out. You’ll see that the picture/grid view of top categories now shows related categories, includes some great articles from subcategories as well, and incorporates a list of featured articles - all in all, hopefully a much more fun and engaging browsing experience, which helps people find what they’re looking for (even when they don’t know what they’re looking for!). There is still a list view as well, which is aimed more at you topic editors and wikiGnomes - that’ll help you if you just want to see a plain list of the articles that are in the category.
Hope you guys like it! We’ve done a bunch of testing but we are still likely to find some bugs as we spend more time using it, so do let us know if you spot any issues. Hopefully the engineering elves can get those bugs squashed quickly and we can enjoy the new interface
“Snazzy” I am really feeling like the 90s.
This looks great! Thanks to our dedicated dev team!
Love it, Anna!!! Got excited about the idea at the meetup.
Nice! Just need it alphabetized perhaps… and the View as text button should go maybe…
Anna
8
@UpsandDowns1234
- Ah, the ‘View as Text’ button is actually there on purpose for logged-in folks, so people can do their wikiGnoming from a text list. It was very specifically and loudly requested last time we redesigned categories, so we made sure not to lose it this time- That list is alphabetized, too, for navigation (but the image view won’t be, by design, since it’s aimed at browsing rather than organizing/editing). Bebeth is looking into whether we can easily and feasibly alphabetize the subcategory list, to make that easier to navigate as well.
@MattheusG
@Mohil-Khare
@RubyRoseRain
@Adelaide
Glad you guys like it! Me too
This does look really cool!
This was long overdue. I mean, I remember feeling a bit lost with the categories. This development will surely make the section look better and as is mentioned, make browsing through them easier. Kudos to the elves and Bebeth. wikiHow is going higher and higher.
Jordan
11
Wow, this looks great - definitely an improvement!
Kudos to all who were involved in making it happen :)
Caeiia
12
Man, I’m glad I’m here to see this. Cool tech upgrades so far!!!
Yay! Snazzy! (such a fun word)
Looks good!
Speaking of looks, it looks like MyLinks have disappeared on the new category pages. Any chance of them making a return, @Anna
?
Anna
15
@Tiagoroth
- The sidebar in general isn’t a feature on the new category pages, since they’re designed around category-specific browsing (rather than FAs and the social Follow box and all that jazz)… so my sense is that it wouldn’t really be feasible to put MyLinks anywhere there neatly. I can certainly share with the team if you’re concerned about it. It just might be the kind of trade-off we have to live with for the benefit of a better category browsing experience (which affects a lot more people than the relative few who use MyLinks).
Thinking more in terms of specifics, is there something you regularly do from category pages using MyLinks that doesn’t seem doable without them? When it comes to shortcuts, I’m more of a browser bookmarks and text replacement person than a MyLinks person, so I’m not super familiar with how one might be using them on category pages specifically. Happy to share any such examples with the devs, and perhaps help you brainstorm workarounds or alternative work flows if this change gets in the way of a regular task you’re looking to do efficiently.
@anna
I have a suggestion for the people who designed this: why not render the descriptions as they appear in the wikitext? Or at least, make the Category namespace ineditable like the Summary namespace? I thought the wikitext came to the category, but it did not, and now, I cannot see the wikitext in the "Mylinks
".
Anna
17
@UpsandDowns1234
Cheers for the suggestion, but it was actually designed this way on purpose, to allow for the custom category descriptions to be uploaded and updated via a more efficient system that can take input for hundreds of categories at once (there’s then also an automated default description to fall back on, for smaller categories that don’t have custom blurbs written for them). This leaves room for tweaking, testing, and optimization of those descriptions, so that we can put our best foot forward to appeal to readers both on the category pages themselves and when the categories appear in search results - and it means nobody has to go to hundreds of category pages individually to do that! The engineers did ask me about removing the edit link, and in theory we could still do so; I just figured since categorizing Category pages is still done by editing the wikitext, having that link there logged in could still prove useful to our category team admins. It’s already been there for several years even in the previous design (where editing the wikitext blurb didn’t change the display, either), so my hunch is it’s not doing any harm; however, if the folks involved in category creation would prefer it gone, they can let us know and I’m sure it’d be simple to do.
When I visit the site, I typically review the newly uploaded files, then use the admin section of my links to skip around to the ANB, speedies, and onwards. I could just backspace or open it as a tab, or just re-arrange my usual routine. No worries though!
