User:Samwalton9 (WMF)/Diffs sandbox

Replacing the Wireframes section on the Diff project page.

Designs

We have some design explorations to share, which we need your feedback on! Take a look and let us know what you think on the talk page.

Is the layout of the page clear?
Is all the functionality and content that you expect on the Diff page present, or have we missed anything?
Do you think the elements of the page would be clear to a new user?
Which of the options do you prefer, and why?

In these designs we have only changed the page layout and information structure - the in-line diff styling has remained the same, as we do not plan to make changes to it right now. These designs only relate to the information around the diff.

Our goal with this redesign is to provide a comparable set of features and links on mobile as on desktop, and to improve the UI of the page so that it's friendlier and more understandable for a newer Wikipedia contributor.

We removed:

The grey "about the user" card in the footer
User edit count
Bytes added

We added:

Links to the article history and talk page
The ability to (un)watchlist the page
Links to the user's talk page and contributions
'Card' UIs to hold the edit summary/timestamp and user information
An Undo button, in the tray alongside Thank
Rollback and Change Visibility buttons (admin only)
The ability to block the user (admin only)

Current version

For comparison, this is the current MobileDiff interface:

Non-admin version

These mocks show the overall design layout. In this version, the 'user details' button expands when pressed to show links for this user - Talk and Contributions. The user details expansion doesn't save much screen space, but it does reduce the number of visual elements presented to users by default. Our hypotheses about this design are that these links aren't needed as often as other elements on the page, and newer users might be confused by the large number of links and buttons on the page.

If those hypotheses aren't true (we plan to test them with data and user testing respectively) then we might consider simply always showing the user links.

To save on vertical screen space, we could also remove the 'Edit summary' heading. The hypothesis behind this decision is that it's usually obvious what this text is - editors should be adding descriptive summaries of what changed in this edit. New users may find the heading helpful, however, especially for ambiguous edit summaries.

This design simply combines the removal of the 'Edit summary' title with the 'User details' dropdown, for completeness.

Admin version

There are three additional actions we have included in our designs, which are typically limited to a project's administrators: Blocking a user, Rollback of the edit, and Changing visibility (revision deletion) of the edit. The same variation options as above exist; we've demonstrated the addition of these actions in a version where the user links are always visible:

We have added a Block button next to Talk and Contribs, as is common elsewhere in the MediaWiki interface. The Rollback and Change visibility buttons have been added to an additional menu in the bottom action tray.

Please let us know what you think about these designs on the talk page! We're very open to adjusting these designs further based on your feedback.