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

We appreciate your patience through what was, admittedly, an especially buggy release yesterday.

We've been working hard to correct the biggest problems, with several fixes already live, and other fixes and adjustments will be released today and tomorrow (and ongoing) as they are completed.

I know it’s difficult to give feedback about the intended changes when there are such glaring functional issues, so now that those are clearing up, I’d like to address some of the questions in that area.

First, I can clarify that the update was meant to primarily affect article content and article page layouts. Many of the issues that were seen – e.g. extra-large text on thread pages, problems viewing the 'full site' on smartphones, misplaced elements in the overall layout – were bugs. Many are fixed, or will be fixed soon, and we are sorry that this has caused some confusion.

For some basic answers to the broader question of "why?", I recommend reading the FAQ section of Help:Layout Changes. Reiterating the point from the blog post itself, these updates are a shift towards “readability and line length that follow modern UX (user experience) best practices”. This is not about "making the desktop site look like mobile", though the ever-growing mobile audience is part of the equation. These best practices are developed by the broader web design industry to meet the needs of today's readers and users, and those of the future.

Some of you may dislike the notion of Wikia "looking like (some other website)" or following trends that you feel to be negative. But please keep in mind the broader goal is to create a good experience for all types of users, whether they be visitors or editors, so they keep coming back. This is a big step toward that goal. There are certainly other steps (on other paths) to get us there too. And there will be course corrections on the way as we learn and iterate.

The help page linked above also outlines the CSS details of how the font size increase at the Desktop XL breakpoint is applied. If any display problems exist with content on specific communities due to this update, please check the help page for solutions and report anything that’s not addressed. We’ll update the help page with information, and specific use cases, as reports come in. Feedback in this area is the most helpful right now.