Comment by patrickmclaren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickmclaren | Hacker News Reader

Sent this email to them:

" Absolutely terrible; increasing the signal/noise ratio, in addition to increasing unnecessary white space were extremely bad design choices.

The purpose of Wikipedia is to share information. The changes that you proposed impede that goal by the addition of a step where the user has to "understand" the design, before they can begin to use it.

You should have reviewed mathematical and scientific journals before you begun your sketch work. Those types of publications succeed at transmitting a high amount of information, very quickly. Bare HTML pages also succeed at transmitting technical information at a very fast rate.

Rather than just stating that Wikipedia is in need of a redesign, state your reasons. The design of Wikipedia is not simply an aesthetic designer's problem, it is a problem that has to be approached from an engineering point of view: maximise the information communication rate whilst keeping the design aesthetically pleasing, not the other way around."

I liked very much the way you have worded it. Especially, the last statement: "The design of Wikipedia is not simply an aesthetic designer's problem, it is a problem that has to be approached from an engineering point of view: maximise the information communication rate whilst keeping the design aesthetically pleasing, not the other way around."

Why mail it to them? We who hang out at HN may find it awful, but it's mean to smear it in their faces.

I'm not sure it's intended as a face-smear; but even if it is, personally I'd prefer to receive direct communication with criticism than to find out later that there is a community mocking my work.

You're reading it wrong - it's blunt criticism, but it's also constructive. It's not fun to read this, but I find it a lot better than someone saying your X is awesome while thinking privately that it sucks.

I mailed them based on a number of reasons: 1. Critiquing is an essential step of the design process, 2. They provided an email address at the end of the post, 3. I wanted to ensure that they weren't reinforcing their design biases that had emerged as a result of their 2 month drive to release their concept.

What? Why in the world would increasing the S/N ratio be "terrible"? You want it to be greater than 1:1.

Also I dont understand these kinds of comments. Do you want us to email them that post with the quotes around them and attribute it to you?

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