[IAEP] wiki design

[Josh Williams]

On 3/11/10 7:05 PM, Frederick Grose wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:03 PM, josh williams <josh at tucson-labs.com 
> <mailto:josh at tucson-labs.com>> wrote:
>
>     From what I could gather, Bernie was just making suggestions for
>     what a site wide navigation could look like. I actually like
>     Bernie's idea of making it more like google's universal nav. I
>     think something like the following would work well:
>
>     Home    Wiki    Download    Activities    More >
>
>     The more link would be a drop down of all our other sub domains.
>
>     At any rate I'm almost done with http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/
>     - so any information on how to edit the main navigation would be
>     very helpful. We can push the changes without changing the main
>     nav once I get finished bug checking, but I think leaving it as it
>     is makes the wiki more confusing than it needs to be.
>
>     --
>     Josh
>
>
> (Dropping systems@ and adding marketing@, as this is more of a design 
> discussion.)
>
> Thank you Josh for your contributions to Sugar Labs!


No problem. Thank you for you input about the design and pointing me in 
the right direction!
>
> I must admit that I would prefer to see a bit more of the Sugar style 
> elements maintained or added to the Sugar Labs wiki skin.
>
> The proposed skin at http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/ has lost many of 
> the style elements found in our product, Sugar, as expressed in The 
> Sugar Interface/Controls 
> <http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface/Controls>. 
> In particular, the bold strokes of the Sugar icons on the tabs, the 
> dark background of the Sugar toolbar with gray-scale icons, and colors 
> holding special meaning 
> <http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface#Imbuing_Color_with_Meaning>.
>
> I like that the proposed skin includes the single-line logo (hoping 
> also that it can be placed so that it also works with the very common 
> monobook skin and others).
>
> Among our sister sites, my favorites for header and navigation 
> linkbars are http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ and 
> http://git.sugarlabs.org/ (primarily because they both seem to use 
> bold underline strokes on the event of mouse pointer hover, and their 
> dark backgrounds remind me of the Sugar toolbar).  I'd prefer that the 
> bright colors of links carry 'special meaning' by being revealed on 
> hover, indicating the appropriate time for user participation, that is 
> a click of a mouse button. The current header navigation links at 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/ and most of the current tab links have this 
> behavior, but need the bolder strokes and underscores of the translate 
> and git headers.  Having the  descender on the 'g' hang over the 
> bottom of the header area at the translate does add a bit of spice, 
> even if it flirts with the Marketing Team's Logo guidelines 
> <http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Logo>.
>
> In the content areas, to keep a clean, uncluttered, and easy-to-read 
> page (especially because of descenders on the typeface), I prefer to 
> have the underscores appear on links only when they are activated by 
> mouse hover.  In the proposed skin, compare, for example, the greater 
> ease of reading those links on the sidebar versus the links in the 
> table of contents box.
>
> Thank you for considering the thoughts and preferences I've presented 
> above.
>
>            --Fred

Thanks for your feedback, I've already made some changes based on your 
comments. I'm with you on having the underscores only appear on hover 
for the main content, but there's a really big usability problem there 
for color blind people or users with a grayscale monitor. If you go to 
http://sugarlabs.org on the XO and set the screen to gray scale it's 
extremely difficult to find links because there's no visual cue other 
than color.

Josh



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