Design
Statement of Purpose
Design at Wikimedia Foundation makes sharing of all human knowledge easy and joyful. For everyone.
The Foundation Product Design team's goal is to ensure that Wikimedia products and communications follow a design process centered on the user. Based on research to understand people’s needs and motivations, we explore solutions that meet those needs.
We design in the open with a transparent and participatory process. We collaborate within the Wikimedia Foundation and with the global community of contributors. We create well-designed solutions, together.
Read more about the background for this statement of purpose.
About the team
The product design and design research team has over 500 years of combined user experience design and research, engineering, information architecture, HCI, visual design, and usability experience.
Product Design
Design Research
The Product Design team works closely with Design Research (also known as Design Strategy). More info on their team page here.
Process
How to get involved and work with us
We welcome help in many ways, but we have limited time and have priorities based on the Foundation's roadmap to focus on. We want to make sure we foster an environment where community designers can contribute to the projects as well as developers.
A few ways to help out by volunteering your time:
- Review, create or contribute to Phabricator design tasks with one of the following tags:
- Design – for issues or requests related to design in Wikimedia movement projects
- Design-Research – for design research requests
- Codex – Design System for Wikimedia including our default user interface library based on Vue.js (intended to eventually replace OOUI)
- Wikimedia-Design-Style-Guide, the predecessor of Codex
- OOUI – our former default user interface library (2015-2022, maintained and improved, but without new feature development)
- Accessibility – for all tasks that are meant to make our interface more accessible and inclusive
- MediaWiki-Interface
- Learn about the Wikimedia design principles and how to give design feedback
Projects
Product teams
Many (but not all) of our cross-disciplinary product teams have a UX designer embedded into the team, where they focus on the User Experience (UX) for the team. Here's a list of the teams in which designers are currently working.
Team | Description | Designer | Area of focus |
---|---|---|---|
Web | The Web Team focuses on the reading experience. | Justin Scherer | Consumers
area managed by:Carolyn Li-Madeo |
Android | The Android team focuses on building inclusive mobile-first experiences, equitably filling knowledge gaps and increasing quality contributions to Wikipedia. | Sarah Chekfa | |
iOS | The iOS team focuses on building mobile first inclusive, consistent, and permeable features to make editing, reading, and participating on Wikipedia intuitive for iOS app users. | Robin Schoenbaechler | |
Editing | The Editing team work on products for editing—generally across MediaWiki, and the suite of editors including VisualEditor, as well as initiatives that facilitate more productive contributions (such as On-wiki collaboration and Edit Check). | Nicolas Ayoub | Contributors
area managed by Nicolas Ayoub, with Amin Al Hazwani |
Growth | The Growth team focuses on features to encourage activation and retention of new editors on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. | Julieta Fernandez | |
Moderator Tools | The Moderator Tools team focuses on content moderation needs and processes, including page protection, deletion, reporting, and recent changes patrolling. | Olga Tichonova | |
Campaigns | The Campaigns Team is focused on building tools to help campaign and event organizers effectively engage participants as successful editors and retain them as contributors on Wikimedia projects. | Gregory Onyeahialam | |
Language and Product Localization | The Language and Product Localization team focuses on reducing barriers to access and share knowledge. Main focus is to reduce knowledge gaps across languages with content and section translation. This team was created as the union of the former Inuka and Language teams. | Pau Giner and Sudhanshu Gautam | Languages & Content Growth
area managed by Pau Giner |
Abstract Wikipedia | The Abstract Wikipedia Team is focused on building Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia, both efforts towards a multilingual Wikipedia where more people can share more knowledge in more languages. | Amin Al Hazwani | |
Design System | The Design System team focuses on creating, maintaining and improving the Wikimedia Design System that provides the building blocks for everything we do. | Bárbara Martínez, | Platforms
area managed by Matthew Williams |
Structured Content | The Structured Data Across Wikimedia team is focused on structuring content on wikitext pages in a way that will be machine-recognizable and relatable, to make reading, editing, and searching easier and more accessible across projects and on the Internet. | Sneha Patel | |
MediaWiki & Data Platform Engineering teams | The MediaWiki Engineering Group specializes in working with MediaWiki and various parts of its core software, whilst the Data Platform Engineering team comprises data teams and systems from across the Product and Technology department with a goal to deliver end-to-end data capabilities for data producers and consumers. | Sarai Sanchez | |
Trust and Safety Product | The Trust and Safety Product team focuses on features to increase digital, and physical safety on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. | Katie Coleman, Joydeep Sengupta | Trust and Safety
area managed by Katie Coleman |
Community Tech | The Community Tech Team is focused on equity and community impact, building and improving curation and moderation tools crowdsourced from experienced users through the Community Wishlist Survey. | Joydeep Sengupta (FOTW project), Wishes design support on a by-project basis | Community Tech
Managed by Joydeep Sengupta |
Design resources
Our resources for majority of our work are public and in open source projects. Have a look at the Wikimedia Design Style Guide (on Github) and its Resources section.
When designing with us bear in mind our Design best practices.
All our graphics assets are licensed under open licenses (but note that many of the logos are trademarked). All our user interface development is public in open source projects.
- Typography, collection of topics around typography and the Typography Refresh 2014
- Visual Style: Icons
Reach out or stay up-to-date
- Read our Design blog
- Find out more about User Research
- Follow @WikimediaDesign on Twitter
Archived, obsolete resources
For historical context:
- Iconography (redirects to the archived WikiFont)
- mediawiki.ui - User interface library (CSS class based approach, archived as superseded by OOUI)
- Living style guide (archived PDF, the website [http://livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org/] is defunct)
- Design Critique
- Design Team Roles
- Help with Micro Design Improvements (obsolete)
- Join the Design mailing list
- Join the #wikimedia-design IRC channel