Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Jan 23, Elisamuel Resto [samuel AT dragonboricua.net] wrote:
> Hey!
> 
> Jucato has gotten a theme together for proposing it for use as our wiki's 
> main
> theme.
> 
> Jucato notes that this theme was tested in moinmoin version 1.8.0
> 
> Working demo: http://jucato.org/moin/

Thanks for doing the work.  Having more structure to the page definitely
helps.


As someone who did professional usability testing for a lot of years and
tried to focus on what users actually did instead of what we wanted them
to do, here's my standard list of pet peeves that usually get ignored.
Granted, some of these are also broken on the current site, but if we're
fixing things it's worth mentioning.

-  Don't use fixed font sizes.  Not everyone's eyes are as good as yours,
   and the default font sizes the browsers use have a lot larger usability
   budget behind them than we do.  If you want parts to be larger or
   smaller than others, use percentages so that the browser defaults and
   then user preferences are better respected.  The newest browsers do
   better at dealing with this and letting users force changes than they
   used to, but not everyone has figured that out.

-  Do leave links underlined.  I know that's so 1992 and designers hate the
   lines all over the place, but users have a horrible track record finding
   relevant links at the best of times.  Taking away visual cues is not
   helpful.  Coloring them is not enough, because too many other sites have
   broken that model and left users thinking they have to mouse over things
   to prove they are links.

-  Do make visited links a different color from unvisited so users can tell
   what they have already tried when they are randomly clicking around
   trying to find something.


I'm sure other people will complain about the colors because people always
complain about the colors.  In my experience as long as there's decent
contrast (no yellow on white) and it's not excessively dark (white on
black), it's almost all the same.

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