JayneG
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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for September 9th:
What’s happening?Content Team tests continue.
The content team is working on some experiments to help readers know that they’re in the right place. For example, we’ve been adding key words
into some introductions to help a reader feel heard. We’ve also been adding a “ Bottom Line
” section on some standard-format articles to see if it helps bring readers to the page.
What’s happening?Adding full interviews to articles.We get some great content for articles from expert interviews, so we decided to do a small test linking to the full interview in an article’s introduction to see if readers are interested in checking out the interview. You can see an example of this here
.
You may have noticed:We have a text-only toggle
option being tested on around 5% of articles. Readers can select this to remove images and make the article easier to skim. Have you used this toggle yet? Do you like having the option available?
You may have noticed:The related wikiHow test has been taken down - we’re keeping the original format for now.
You may have noticed:The team is planning to delete some smaller categories as part of the reorganization process, so we have added a warning that comes up if anyone tries to add an article to one of these categories. It will simply let you know, and ask you to pick a different category
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For the “Bottom Line” section, is it going to get it’s own icon and table of contents listing if it goes well?
Also, for the interviews, I think that they should be presented in a better way than a link in the intro. But I understand that it’s still being tested, so I guess that this will be changed if the test goes well. Also, will they be locked to wikiHow pro members only, or will they be available to everyone, or will it depend on the article?
For the text only toggle, I wouldn’t use it, but maybe some people will like it. But I do think that it should “remember” that you enabled it so that it transfers to other articles, either through a cookie, or, if a user is logged in, then through a note on the account.
I like that the Related wikiHow’s section is staying how it is. I don’t think that it really needs to be redesigned and that it looks good how it is.
And I am happy that the categories are going to start being cleaned up. That has been going on for quite a while. (Also, I noticed the AbuseFilter for it a little bit ago. I’m sad that I can’t see how it works though.
)
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JayneG
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I’m sure if the Bottom Line becomes a permanent section then it will get a nice icon and be in the contents
At the moment interviews are for everyone, with no plan to make them only for Pro members.
That’s a good idea about remembering people’s choice for the text-only option.
And me too - that took some magical engineering work by Aaron behind the filter!
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I really liked the edits adding keywords and bottom line! I like the expert interviews too! Looks great!
Lovely! I very often paste ?display_images=false
beside the URL, or turn the toggle on if available, to hide images. I love having the option available!
Ah, I really liked the related wikiHow testing…
The new format looked good! Are there any plans to get it back?
I think a tick mark (like the one that appears in QAM format) and any similar green icons might look good!
Again, I think, so anything that is chosen will definitely look great!
Yep, I agree!
Hm, so what are the categories that are going to be deleted? Is Environmental Awareness Events
being removed (because I got warned for putting an article in that category)? Where will articles currently categorized under Environmental Awareness Events be moved to? I know, I’m being too very specific, but I’m wondering…
Wow, great! I hope this stays this way!
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As part of this category fix, it seems that if you publish the same edit after publishing it the first time without fixing the category, its going through and sticking without a change.
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JayneG
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@Buterflie
No, there are no plans to re-test the related wikiHow format at the moment.
If you get the warning when adding an article, then it’s likely that it’s planned to be removed. The best plan is to find a more broad category, such as Environmental Awareness.
@EpcotMagic
That’s correct - we did that intentionally. We want to give everyone the information they need to make an informed decision.
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Thanks for letting me know! I’ll re-categorize it soon!
I hope it’s not bad etiquette of me to mention something from the August 12th post
in this thread – I wanted to give some feedback about the category page redesign mentioned there, but didn’t want to bump the thread!
Putting the specific section under a cut so it's easy to reference
This is what it looks like out in the wild (sorry for any weirdness, Discourse is giving me the Processing bug again so I embedded another editor’s offsite upload):
I know near-nothing about design, so I won’t pretend I’m an expert, but the page looks pretty visually unbalanced like this. The image size on the large tiles has changed, but the font size hasn’t, so it leaves behind a lot of whitespace and can make the category look empty at a glance. It’d probably look better if the font size on the large tiles was bumped up, like it is on the Relationships category page.
(I’m also not sure if there’s enough color contrast on the category pages to keep everything from visually fading together, and categories without enough pages to fill a full row end up with a lot of empty whitespace too, but making those look better requires a level of design knowledge beyond “attended art middle school and gleaned random tips off social media.”)
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I absolutely agree with @anon74718567
There are many large blank whitespaces, which makes the page longer, so you need to scroll down more. It also looks like the big titles are extra-special, and gets more importance and attention, while the smaller ones look insignificant to me. Again, nor am I an expert, so I can’t tell–but that was my thinking.
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JayneG
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Totally fine to pop it here. I decided after seeing them yesterday to take a day or two to see how I feel about them. I’m no design expert either, and I know that often it takes me time to get used to a new visual change from Apple etc, but let’s compile some feedback to pass on. This is what I’m understanding so far:
- Increase the font size on larger tiles to leave less whitespace (like on the Relationships page)
- Lack of color contrast makes articles fade together (perhaps fill in the background of the title area with green like on the Relationships page?)
- Categories without a full last row feel empty (any suggestions?)
- Additional whitespace makes the reader need to scroll more
Feel free to add any feedback you have here so we can help inform any possible changes moving forward
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Yeah, I certainly don’t want to be making snap judgements just because it’s a New Thing™. I just have family members who need reading glasses, and knew at a glance that they’d be making some frustrated comments about the text size. lol
To “balance” the text with the image: I also had the thought of some smaller text at the bottom of the text space, sort of like how VeryWell lists their authors or medical reviewers on their article tiles. But I’m not really sure what we’d put there, unless we named expert co-authors (and that would look really similar to VeryWell and competitor sites, plus it could risk implying authorship). Readership numbers, maybe? We should raise the font size on the large tiles either way, but throwing that idea out there, too.
For lack of contrast: I’m not totally sure what would make it look better – like I said, I have a middle-school knowledge of design. But a green fill might work if we either change the borders to a darker shade of green, or remove the borders entirely (it’d potentially look weird or even gross to have green next to gray like that, especially with how thin and light the gray is). It might be worth testing some other colors in the wikiHow color palette, and I also wonder if we could dabble with borders themselves, but I’m not really sure how the latter would work.
For empty category rows: Maybe centering the tiles that are on that row? I’m not 100% sure how to fix that one either, but centering tiles might make the row’s whitespace less obvious, because there isn’t a giant “cutout” in the pattern that basically screams “there should be something right here.”
I’ll follow up if I think of anything else, too
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JayneG
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Awesome, thanks for the additional ideas. I’ve passed this thread on to the Right People™ so they can take a look through our feedback!
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Hi everyone! Thanks to all of you for posting feedback here. It’s so helpful to get your thoughts and reactions to changes to the site. It absolutely helps guide us to see what we might need to reassess, update, or implement to best meet users’ needs. If you have any other feedback on recent changes to the site, please do keep posting your thoughts here, I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread for any other ideas! I really appreciate it.
Emily, Product @ wikiHow
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Hello, I have some feedback for the new main category pages (not any of the subcategories). First, I think that the New Articles section is neat, but they are bellow the Related Topics section all the way on the bottom, since most people will probably not see it there, maybe it could be moved up. I also noticed that there was a search bar in the image on the category. I was thinking that it would only search that category, which is neat, but I found out that it actually searches the whole site like the one at the top. I don’t know how possible this is, but perhaps they could be set to only search that category? I also saw the neat new pictures on all of the main category pages, which helps make the pages neater and makes it seem more professional, but maybe the pictures could be in the “wikiHow style illustrations”, which might be cool. But I’m not a designer, and it might not actual look good, so that might be a bad idea. And for the Health category, maybe Men’s Health can be placed next to Women’s Health instead of being separated, since they are similar topics? Anyways, those are my ideas, I’m not a designer by any means of the imagination, and I’ve been really bad at it in the past, so they might not be the best ideas, but I just wanted to share them. Also, I noticed that the image for the Skin Care category in the Personal Care and Style category is the wrong one.
And, not category page feedback, but I wanted to mention that it is fun to repeatedly click the text only slider quickly. It’s fun to watch it move back and forth. I was entertained by it for longer than I’d like to admit.
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Increase the font size on larger tiles to leave less whitespace:
Agree with @JayneG
and @anon74718567
! I think some smaller text at the bottom of the text space will look good. Maybe not expert co-authors because some articles are while others aren’t expert-co authored. Maybe, readership stats and accuracy rating, perhaps? But again, some articles have low readership and/or low accuracy ratings–which may discourage readers to click on them and read them further. Perhaps, the first few lines of the article’s intro (with an ellipsis at the end) could be displayed? Or maybe the title could be brought down and with larger font, which will fill up the space? I think that would be called “centring” as Alex said. I’m having trouble explaining myself, so I have taken a screenshot and edited it the way to show what I want to tell:
(Note that I have only centred the title, not changed font size.)I don’t know if these things can be done on the wiki software, but that’s what I’m thinking of. Lack of contrast makes articles fade together:
I agree with @JayneG
and @anon74718567
, that will look good! The green on the Relationships page makes the articles stand out good, and the Relationships page actually looks great with no borders.
Categories without a full last row feel empty:
I agree with @JayneG
and @anon74718567
. Maybe, could we have more space between two titles on the last row on such categories? Perhaps that would be called “centring” as Alex said. I’m again having trouble explaining myself, so I have taken a screenshot and edited it the way to show what I want to tell:
I don’t know if these things can be done on the wiki software, but that’s what I’m thinking of. Additional whitespace makes the reader need to scroll more:I don’t think much can be done about this, I think it’s okay to scroll more because I noticed this change isn’t there in mobiles yet. So will the display on phones remain the same?
Additional feedback:
This change gives me a look that the articles with larger titles are more important, special and better than the others–while the ones with smaller titles are not-so-important and insignificant. Anyone else who feels this way? I think, maybe if the smaller ones are made a little larger, keeping only 5 titles in one row instead of the current 6, that would be better. Attached image because I’m not able to explain. I mean, like this:
Current one just for comparison:
Any other ideas on this? And, I totally agree with what @R2_d2000
said! Yes, I think wikiHow-style images might look good.
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Something I’ve noticed with the new category pages is that the Featured Articles section isn’t easily distinguished from the rest of the articles in that category, and it can make it look like there are duplicates in the category (when the reality is that you were just skimming and/or scrolling too fast). This sticks out in popular categories where there are a lot of featured articles, like the Relationships category
.
I think it probably stems from the fact that the headers between these sections aren’t that noticeable. The font size isn’t much larger than the titles, the text isn’t centered, and there’s not much padding or other attention-getting aspects (centered text, different font families, “highlighting” the header with colors or design elements, etc.) that would draw the eye.
I wonder if it might also help to have a “carousel” design that keeps all the featured articles on one line, but I kind of hate article carousels, and I’m not sure if the internet collectively shares that sentiment!
off-topic, but could we please get this “processing” bug fixed? it’s really inconvenient having to upload all my images to the wiki to post them here
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I have a question. Can the New Articles section be removed from the wikiHow Category
? It really serves no purpose on that category, and it is kind of annoying as well. Also, since the Featured Articles category is inside of the wikiHow category, it doesn’t actually show new articles about wikiHow, so I don’t see a reason for it to be there.
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It means writing wikiHow article
:pen
