Wikipedia:Interface changes
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Interface changes annoy people, because people are creatures of habit. That annoyance is usually temporary, because people get used to change, especially when it's a change for the better. In addition, editor churn means that new people joining after the change never saw the old way, and don't need to adapt, so over time there's a demographic trend to acceptance as well.
To minimise pain, any interface change should be one of the following:
- small enough that nobody notices or complains,
- small enough that grumblings don't lead to a "we won't stand for this" snowball of outrage,
- opt-in,
- opt-in for existing users, opt-out for new users,
- easily opt-out for all users,
- important enough to impose despite pissing people off.
It's worth observing of course that this list doesn't apply in isolation; it depends on how much prior discussion and testing the interface change had. Given good testing and community collaboration in design for something that's clearly an improvement, even an imposed change that annoys quite a few people will eventually be accepted.
Most importantly, changes that have not been communicated enough are more likely to be considered by someone a "sudden error" or something that was changed without notification or necessary consensus and can therefore changed without consideration, leading to on-wiki wheel wars or other disruptive chain reactions that can (socially) kill even the (technically) best change ever.
Some examples
- Wikipedia:Notifications ("Echo"), which suddenly abolished the Orange Bar for new usermessages (not having learned from bugzilla:25145, which tried to turn it blue to match the Vector style), although an option was supposed to be provided.
- The watchlist formatting change which led to the creation of the Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists page and the removal of the feature, used on all Wikimedia projects, from en.wiki.
- Introduction of the Vector skin.