Wikipedia Launches New User Interface

by Naoko

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 at 06:54 AM EDT

An update from the user experience team …

Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository with over six million assets, has a brand new user interface and navigation today. This is the first roll out of the usability improvements to Wikimedia projects after English Wikinews and Wikimedia Strategic Planning adopted the usability beta as default interface during its early beta phase.

The highlight of improvements are:

• We are changing our default look to a new theme we call "Vector" which makes essential functions easier to find.
• Editing pages will be easier, thanks to a new editing toolbar that makes it simpler to insert links and tables, and a built-in "cheatsheet" to access help for the most commonly used functions.
• All users will also see that the site layout has changed noticeably. We've simplified the site navigation, relocated the search box to satisfy user expectations and to follow other web standards, reduced some of the clutter, and made sure that the new features work with different resolutions, browser formats, and window sizings.

(The multimedia user experience team is currently working to simplify the upload process and the new upload process will be available later this year.)

The details of the improvements can be found at our blog post from March 25.

We hope you find the new interface intuitive and easy to navigate.[1] If the new interface does not work out for you and if you prefer to stick to the classic look and feel, follow the "New!" link on the top of the page and go to the "Take me back!" section.

Our next roll-out is English Wikipedia. We are planning to introduce the new interface and navigation design to English Wikipedia towards the end of April.

Thank you for your interest,

Naoko Komura and the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team

[1] The new toolbar is currently not supported in Internet explorer 8.

This article originally appeared on Wikimedia blog.