Inspired by the discussions of the design team meetings, I have been
playing around with a few ideas for a simple navigation model for the
mobile that can extend the feature set of tools and options available to
users. It struck me that the article lead, some images and infobox data can
give a very good idea of a topic that is alien to the reader and such a
compact view on the mobile screen has a lot of value.
It got me thinking of the possibility of decomposing any wiki page into
multiple 'views' or layers that can alter the way one views the same page
by selectively rearranging and hiding the content based on user usage
patterns. Possible page layers could be:
A) Overview: Condensed view of the article optimized for the small touch
screen. It can also contain an index of topics covered that can act as
navigation aid to jump directly to a section in the Article layer
B) Article: The whole article, just like what you see in the current mobile
site
C) Gallery: Thumbnails of pictures, videos from the article. Could also
fetch related content from other wikimedia projects
D) Category: Allows you to jump to related topics if you are interested in
the subject.
E) Discussion: The talk page to discuss
The search and other page functions including language selections go into a
menubar that floats above the article. It would work like the menubar in
Google Now which Pau Giner had showed during our meetings. When you scroll
down its hidden, as you scroll up, the menu pops up again, which means that
all the functions including search can be accessed from any part of the
page (A variation of the sticky nav). This also saves screen space when you
are reading and scrolling down, giving you a full page view of the article
with no distractions.
You can see a visual overview of this here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Wikimedia_mobile_layer_n…
Just an idea, more discussion with the design team pending.
--
Arun Ganesh
(planemad) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad>
<http://j.mp/ArunGanesh>
