Board Thread:A new Tardis, at last/@comment-57280-20150105151618/@comment-188432-20150106175506

Shambala108 wrote:

As User:Rob T Firefly stated in another thread, why do the 4 social network icons get their own button, but the more important functions need a hover (or in the case of page history and what links here, two hovers)? Are the social network functions really used more than the edit and talk page functions? Rob is a little off in his assessment of what's going on with this — though completely understandably so. In fact, social icons do roll up into a "master social icon" once you start interacting with the page. The individual platform icons only appear on first page load. Please see Thread:167236 for an illustrated demonstration of the functionality. The table of contents icon is poorly placed. If there's no TOC, the pencil icon is on top, but if there is a TOC, its icon is on top. Also, aside from the fact that you need a hover (or series of hovers) to get to a specific location on the TOC, you can no longer get a look at the entire TOC in one glance. Good point. I'll be passing that one along. I get what you're saying about the touch devices (though I often edit on my ipad, and I've always found the hovers more of a pain than the clicks), but most of the improvements just cause more work. For those of us with thousands or tens of thousands of edits, it will take a while to make new habits, and for new users, who might already be unfamiliar with how to edit on a wiki, it seems like it's just more confusing having to decipher icons that are not really intuitive. I've already filed a report based upon the comments in this thread. However, i'm not entirely sure I agree with you that the icons are wholly arcane or counterintuitive. I think most people are trained by everyday use of mobile devices that a gear icon means "preferences", of one kind or another, and that a pencil means "edit", and that a box with an arrow coming out of it means "share", in some way or another. Still, it probably is less than ideal that the pencil seems to mean one thing at the sectional level and another in the left nav.

I understand that a lot of hard work went into these changes, and that it can be frustrating to hear nothing but negative, but it's also frustrating to be used to doing things a certain way then have to make changes. No, I think it's much better to hear something than for these changes to just go through on the nod. All this feedback is helping!