Article Guidance , the project that kept me busy the last few months, is available as an experiment on a few pilot Wikipedias. The goal is to help the less experienced Wikipedia editors in the creation of Wikipedia articles. You can use the feature in a real environment by starting a new article on Simple English Wikipedia . Creating a new Wikipedia article is a rewarding activity, and while this…
Learning is a journey. Currently, Wikipedia is a great resource to support you in your learning journey. In this exploration, I illustrated how Wikipedia could support people through more parts of this journey. The ideas presented in the video below were discussed and prototyped in unconference sessions at two consecutive recent events in Nairobi and San Francisco (and some airports in between).…
Meeting people in person after a long time. After these last pandemic years of travel restrictions, I’ve been able to meet in person with the different people I collaborate with. Including the Design team in Paris, the Language team in Hyderabad and the San Francisco colleagues in the office. Design team offsite in Paris The Design team was meeting in Paris and it was the first time meeting…
A blog post about the Wikimedia Design style guide was recently published. The origin was a conversation with David Golberg about the construction of open participatory design systems and some parallelisms with architecture.
Last October in a meeting in Bangalore, an engineer of our team asked me about useful resources to learn more about design. It is always great to see interest in design from everyone, but especially from the developers that put together the pieces to build the interfaces for our users. She half-joking mentioned that I may just recommend UX Design for mobile , the book I co-authored and was…
In the past I wrote about the design process of Content Translation and how the tool was born. The tool has been growing since then. While still in beta, it is showing a positive impact already as it was highlighted in the recent Wikimedia Foundation annual report . Last summer the project crossed the milestone of one hundred thousand articles translated . This video celebrates the achievement: It…
In February 2016, I gave a talk in a TEDx event organised by my university in Valencia ( TEDxUPValència ). The talk (in Spanish with subtitles available in other languages) explored the potential of global collaboration tools and the challenges in their design. It has been a real pleasure to participate with a great group of speakers and an amazing organisation. You can check the videos for all…
On November 12 I attended Google SPAN in London . A one-day design event that was also happening in New York two weeks earlier. The videos of most sessions are already available for you to check. The sessions covered interesting and diverse topics about design. Personally I found very refreshing to hear about the experiences of applying the design process in areas that are far from my day-to-day…
Content Translation is a tool that facilitates the translation of Wikipedia articles. The initial beta version was launched for several languages and it has been used already to create more than one thousand articles. Designing this new translation experience has been an exciting journey, but before going into the details you can check how the tool works in the video below. The translation process…
This is why Em units become often a source of issues in layout : An example illustrating the side-effects that affect Em units when used for text and spacing.
The smartwatch is a reality. However, most of the smartwatches available are based on the same display-centered paradigm: attaching a small touchscreen to your wrist. While this approach brings some benefits, it seems to move us one more step towards the world of perpetual distraction. The wrist watch is an orientation device. It allows humans to determine in which point of time we are. We look…
Last month I attended the IxDA’s Interaction conference with other members of the Wikimedia Design team. We organised a workshop as part of the event, and attended many talks. In a nutshell: three days of listening and talking to lots of designers in different settings. The talks on stage Videos of the talks are available so those unable to attend the conference can check them out. From the…
The Web is available in all kinds of flavours. You can access it from a pair of glasses to a big TV screen, not to mention the ubiquitous mobile and tablet devices. Designing a solution that works across all these different devices is a challenging task. Each platform has its unique set of both capabilities and limitations. One way to support all those platforms could be to stick to the features…
Often static mockups are not enough to communicate a design, and you need to bring the designs to life with a prototype. Prototypes are key to support story-centered design , but creating them is not an easy task. You need to choose the right level of detail to communicate your idea with the minimal effort in order to do it as quickly as possible. During these years I have been using different…
This is part of the prototyping tools overview series . Pencil is a tool to create click-through prototypes. The result are HTML prototypes composed of a sequence of images (displayed one at a time). When the user clicks on an active areas of an image, a new image is displayed to simulate the change of state. You can view a prototype I created with Pencil for a translation tool as an example.…
This is part of the prototyping tools overview series . Adobe Fireworks is a tool loved by many designers. Fireworks supports the whole process of creating a click-through HTML prototype and provides some extra features that allow interaction beyond clicking. You can check how Fireworks is used at Cooper to get an idea of their use on a collaborative design process. You can also try an example…
This is part of the prototyping tools overview series . Tumult Hype is a tool to create interactive animations. Hype is available on Mac for slightly less than $50. Prototypes made with Hype can make use of animation, touch gestures, and react to user events such as typing or scrolling. As a result you can simulate rich interactions easily. You can find some examples I created of both interactive…
This is part of the prototyping tools overview series . Web technologies are also useful to create prototypes. If you have doubts about whether an interaction can be prototyped with a tool, you can call HTML, CSS and Javascript to the rescue. A prototype of a translation tool is a good example. If you want to reproduce the experience of users translating, you need to allow them to edit freely and…
The Autonym font was announced in the Wikimedia blog . The Autonym font is a font that contains only the glyphs that are absolutely necessary for display a list of languages. This small font solves an interesting conflict between UX and performance when dealing with lists of languages. The problem of discoverability When content is provided in several languages, you can find a list of languages…
When I am using a computer which is not mine, sometimes I have a hard time to find some “special” characters used in Catalan or Spanish such as “ç” and “ñ”. Then, I imagine what would happen if all my characters were “special”, and even my own computer’s keyboard was not prepared for them. This is the situation for many languages around the…