Improve menu style

[fnielsen]

The menu is now quite wide after #956 closing #25. We also have many menu items. Possible a more hierachical menu should be implemented.

[carlinmack]

The easy way to do this is just mash all of these together:

Also being a bit more specific with these words would be beneficial. As an outsider I can't easily tell the difference between Work and Project for example.

However if we want to do this properly this is more of a philosophical issue about what avenues we users will be looking for. This would be three or four things that people want to do and everything related to them is in the dropdown, i.e. "Academics" (People), Journals (Where people write), Tools (Things that aren't Scholia) and About (What is Scholia?)

EDIT: Is Tools only useful for us? maybe it shouldn't be on the top bar. I'd instead propose "Academics" (People), Journals (Where people write), Topics (Portals for broad issues) and About (What is Scholia?)

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Why does it have to be a drop-down?

What about going with some more fluid list similar to how the properties are listed in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Template:NIH_properties , or with groupings as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Zika ?

[carlinmack]

A dropdown can be hierarchical

which is similar to the Zika template. However you can't put as much information as either of your examples from a UX perspective. No one wants to spend a full minute digesting 100 words of content to find what they're looking for. I would mock this up but I have a lot of school work at the moment

[fnielsen]

The menu in https://tools.wmflabs.org/ordia/ expands horizontally.

[carlinmack]

It is an established design pattern that clicking brings you to a new page and hover shows more information. Ordia breaks this which surprises the user.

As far as I can tell it is impossible to access the sub menu of "Aspects" using only keyboard navigation which makes the site inaccessible.

Finally it is unclear what is a horizontal-expand and what is a link in that menu

It is possible to fix all of these problems with a horizontally expanding menu however should we really spend time reinventing the wheel?

[carlinmack]

Had a play around and I think this is a good start:

scholia toolbar.xlsx

[carlinmack]

Daniel's comment will appear shortly, this is the result of our conversation, @fnielsen thoughts?

scholia toolbar.xlsx

To implement this I'd first create the pages in green, then create the hierarchical menu html/css and finally implement the above

[fnielsen]

With 7 columns it will still render badly on a mobile phone

[Daniel-Mietchen]

The following are my unedited comments on Carlin's initial comment from today, which are in part already outdated by his comment directly above, as we happened to meet in person before I could finish writing this up.

---

Good start indeed - thanks!

I like the idea of moving from a predicate-focused arrangement to an object-focused one, since those object classes should be more intuitive for users not familiar with Wikidata properties. However, items such as the CDC can have multiple roles, which we currently reflect via different aspects (six in this case)

Some things that would need further thoughts:

• renaming the "Author" aspect to "Academics" will miss corporate authorship, e.g. as per https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/author/Q583725 (CDC)
  • so if we go that route, we'd have
• renaming "Work" to "Articles" neglects books, patents, court cases and many other things
• renaming "Venue" to "Journals" neglects conference proceedings

---

For a similarly drafty way of representing the different Scholia pages (and the errors observed in there), see See also https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Scholia/Components .

[carlinmack]

@fnielsen that's the first mention of phones in this discussion, I was not designing with them in mind. Do you have any ideas?

[fnielsen]

I do not usually use Scholia from a phone. A few times I show it. Usually the pages are terrible slow. The menu is line breaking. Ordia behaves a bit better on a phone.

[fnielsen]

Mobile phone issues are #903

[carlinmack]

Could you comment on the current ideas then? I think the mobile toolbar can be discussed at a later stage, one issue at a time

Also the only way to reduce from 7 columns is for the core team to find consensus with what should be dropped, no design can reduce the amount of information.

[fnielsen]

In regard to naming I have the same issues as Daniel. Also I am not sure why Research Center and University are split. There are many other organization types than Research Centers and Universities. Moving Awards to topics is one idea that could quickly be done and save a bit of vertical space.

[carlinmack]

https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/organization/ only references Research Centers and Universities, the ball is in your court to provide more types if that is what you want.