On the design faq page

On the design faq page

Postby konstin » 31 Jan 2017, 20:09

There has been an ongoing discussion about the design of the faq page on the wiki. Unfortunately, this discussions and the resulting edits were driven by miscommunication and uncoordinated acting, so I want use thread to find a final consensus solution to this issue.

First of all, let me state the past events in chronological order:
1. With the help of samuncle and later MTres19, I wrote a skin for the new wiki. For the content pages, including the faq page, I used a simple design which basically just fitted mediawiki's html into the new skin.
2. Samuncle introduced some advanced styling using a mediawiki plugin and additional css. In that process, the individual faq entries were hidden in an accordion.
3. Later on, I removed the show/hide design, so all articles were always displayed. More on why I did this below.
4. Recently, MTres19 reintroduced the show/hide design.

The reason why I removed the accordion design were UX considerations: The frequently asked questions are something a user normally wants to read through as a whole, which is cumbersome when having to click every single entry open. Additionally, they should be concise enough that there is no need for hiding parts away. I admit though that the design with the always open accordion was quite ugly. Therefore, I suggest redesigning the page to a simple header-body structure which is what most faq pages I consider great do. The question whether we need a table of contents or not remains up to debate.
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Re: On the design faq page

Postby onpon4 » 31 Jan 2017, 20:47

I personally don't care as long as the site works without JavaScript. Great job on that, by the way! :)
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Re: On the design faq page

Postby MTres19 » 31 Jan 2017, 21:58

I reinstated the collapsibles at samuncle's request. The main problem with a typical header-content format is that an FAQ page is not meant to be read chronologically. The purpose is that you find a question that you want an answer to, then you look at the answer. Imagine if Stack Overflow (Q&A format, remember) used a header-content format. That's an extreme example, but that's the spirit of the Q&A format. Not everyone wants to read every FAQ question—they instead skip to the one they want, or, in the case of the collapsibles, expand the the one they want. The semi-consensus of the previous thread was that an expand-all button would be the ideal solution/compromise. Since I don't know JavaScript, I wrote an FAQ system with pure HTML and CSS. However, that was not an ideal solution due to some limitations of CSS and it wouldn't integrate well with a MediaWiki template.

If you know JavaScript/jQuery, konstin, maybe you could somehow wire an expand all button into the mw-collapsible class. Another possibility (which I really don't like) is using the ArticleMinorTitle template which I created earlier, which would make it easier to differentiate questions from answers. However, considering the usage of an FAQ page as outlined above, I really do not see any problem with the collapsibles, and I think first impressions (prettyness) is more important than UX for a page that's not likely to be accessed many times by the same person.
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Re: On the design faq page

Postby samuncle » 01 Feb 2017, 02:58

After speaking with auria I tweaked the style and now you can click on the whole title instead of just a tiny expand button which is better.
We could eventually add an Expand all button, but IMHO the current design is good enough.

Please don't revert the edit we are mainly happy with the result :)

Thanks
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