Compact Personal Bar

Currently disabled, until at least phab:T85541 is fixed. Per phab:T86831 and m:Tech/News/2015/05.

Goal

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The personal tools bar is long, and getting longer. Let's start thinking about how we would make this into a collapsed flyout control that takes up less space on screen but is easy to access, organized, and still has high priority things like notifications visible at all times.

Some suggested things to accomplish

  • Top level access to notifications
  • Top level access to your watchlist
  • Create solution that works with touch interfaces and mouse based ones
  • Create consistency with Mobile roadmap of "personal drawer" on right side of web app for editor and contributory features

While the space taken up by the personal bar is not particularly limited on all wikimedia content projects in the present UI, the issue will be much more pronounced with the rollout of the Winter/Fixed Header UI, which aims to reduce navigational elements for an increased focus on article content and primary actions like editing and discussion.

Code

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Extension which this is a part of:

Logging schema:

Planning

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Landscape Audit

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Analytics & Things to test

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  • How do we arrive at the best possible order of items in the menu
    • How can we partner with Analytics team to come up with experiments where items are random or semi-random to discover the best arrangement?
    • How do we define "best" arrangement
      • matches current access to each destination in the current personal bar?
      • higher traffic to certain features (which?)
      • equal traffic to each destination?
  • Instrument current personal bar in a way that we can compare the Beta Feature numbers to the current version

Design

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Beta Features - Compact Personal Bar Sketch

Proposed List order:

Inside flyout:

Username
–––––––––––––––––––
Contributions
Watchlist (count[1])
Messages (count)
Notifications (count)
–––––––––––––––––––
Other items added by extensions & gadgets[2]
–––––––––––––––––––
Preferences
Beta
Language
–––––––––––––––––––
Privacy (WMF specific)
Help
–––––––––––––––––––
Log out

Outside of flyout (icons):

Watchlist
Messages / flyout
Notification / flyout

Design V2

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CPB v2 main flyout

Major Feedback:

Issue: Icon ordering and duplication

  • Icons outside of flyout order has been revised to reflect order inside of flyout
  • Icons have been move to right side of flyout to have consistent placement regardless of user name length
  • All Icons now have flyouts (icon = quick access to items, flyout = places on the site to go)

Issue: confusing metaphors for some Icons

  • Icon with issues have been replaced
  • Consistent icon usage with other site features
  • Proposed change to default Echo flyout to not include talk page messages to remove duplicate items within notifications and message flyouts.

Issue: light grey icons could look disabled

  • Normal state icons have been darkened
  • Icons have hover and click states
  • "Constructive" blue (mediawiki.ui) color is used for active state of icons and "Progressive" green for notification counts
 
CPB flyout icons v2

Alternative designs from community members

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Rezonansowy's design from Winter's feedback page

References

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  1. Apparently this is possible to get, but might take a little magic-ing, talk to Aaron Schulz - bugzilla:65246
  2. only 1 rule if this section is empty

Want to give feedback?

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We'd love to hear your feedback on the design, just leave a message on the Talk Page.