User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Layout Changes: Breakpoints and Typography/@comment-5275700-20150520212753/@comment-5275700-20150522011853

@Gloweye, thanks for your detailed response.

You’re clearly familiar with some of the research and best practices around readability. But I think that your notes leave out a very important variable that’s a big factor — the viewer’s distance from the screen. At a certain distance, the text can also become too small to read. My personal experience this week, sitting at my desk with the bigger monitor about 30 inches from my face, has been interesting. With my browser window at XL size, the increased text size was jarring at first (right after the release) but quickly became comfortable. And then switching it back to 14 pt sometimes to compare things, I found I was leaning in to read it the text, which suddenly seemed uncomfortably small. Was I doing that all along? It’s hard to recall. (Quick bio: in my 30’s, wear corrective lenses, stare at screens all day long.)

Similarly to what you are talking about in your comment, very long/wide lines of text also require extra eye motion or even head motion, which is tiring for the reader, and that’s one of the reasons for the reduced maximum width.

Another reason for the font increase at XL is to help with layout consistency. This is something we heard quite a bit about when fluid layout was released, from users who were fans of the single fixed width. The font increase helps the page layout to remain similar at all breakpoints. It’s not perfect (the images don’t change in size, for one thing) but it keeps things from shifting around too much.

So where does all of this information and individual experience take us? People have widely varying hardware setups and methods of accessing Wikia. One point that’s been made often in these comments is that users/viewers are already free to adjust the font size using their browser’s zoom function (and other tools). This is still true, but what’s happened is that the set of people who may need to zoom has now changed a little due to this update. And many of the commenters here are people who didn’t change their zoom before, but feel they need to now. Let’s not forget about the people who, last week, might have been zooming in, and now they don’t have to. They’re out there too, but are clearly not commenting on this blog. The experiences of all of these people are valid, just like those who preferred fixed width to fluid or responsive. We’re never going to find the perfect layout for everyone.

With regard to your comment about “stability” of the platform, I think it’s important to differentiate between “stable” and “static”. Stable, available, reliable, functional — these are definitely what we strive for, and achieve most of the time. But you seem to be hoping for a more static experience, based on your choice of words. We are indeed hoping to make Wikia feel more modern. This is an ongoing process that includes the general layout and structure of the site, the look and feel of the page elements that are present on every page. It also includes developing tools to help editors create content in a way that works well on all devices, displays and platforms (better tools is something else you touched on in your comments). But for every change that someone perceives as helpful or progressive, someone else may feel that it’s unnecessary and restrictive. Again, we’re never going to find the perfect solution for everyone, but we can keep trying. Wikia is a software company and we iterate, learn, evolve and move forward.

Regarding release methods and timelines, we’re always working on the best ways to roll out specific changes and updates. This week is clearly not an example of “the best”, and the feedback from you and others is helpful in efforts to improve.