Member-only story
Wikipedia got a UI tweak. You probably failed to notice.
In the world of jazzy & snappy UIs, it still feels like a dinosaur.
Seated in front of my desktop, I was looking for some details on the USS Nimitz — one of the biggest and most recognisable aircraft carriers of the US Navy.
Don’t ask me why. Ask me how.
As with most things, I turned to one of the most ubiquitous, free (and at times unreliable) sources on the internet — Wikipedia. But what I didn’t expect when I clicked the link was a new, refurbished look!
Mind you, I have been looking at Wikipedia pages for well over a decade now, and have loved it (the content, not the interface) since my school days. But Wikipedia was never too bothered about its ease of use, or at least I felt so.
I had gotten used to the old look so much that even this small change felt refreshing. The changes were minimal, which is not surprising considering they hadn’t changed anything for over 10 years!
The table of contents weren’t in a grey box within the article any more. They had moved to the left. Pretty neat!
- One gripe I had with the old style was that for most pages, the table of contents came after an introduction section. Often, the intro extended so much that this table would be somewhere below the fold, and you had to scroll down to get to it. Not anymore!
- The other was that it was part of the article itself, so it scrolled up and down with it. Any time I had to refer to a different section, I first had to scroll up and find the table of contents. What a pain in the ass!
Speaking of the left panel, the numerous things that were there on the left (that no one ever looked at) were packed into the new hamburger menu on the top left.
The curious designer in me started scouring for other changes. Needless to say, I couldn’t find all of them.
We look at these things for years, but it’s surprising how little we recall when we are given a blank slate. The human memory is optimized for…
