Wiki Life: Design Principles

Hello Ninjas and welcome everybody to our Wednesday - Wiki Life post.

In my last post here on the WikiNinjas Blog, I talked to you about the principle of invisibility.

Today I present a principle again. But unlike the principle of Invisibility, this principle we already we use in our articles, without even knowing that it exists.

The story of this principle began when I had to prepare my slides for the WebCast that we performed for the Brazilian community on the TechNet Wiki. (Wiki Life: TechNet WebCast Wiki Brazil). I needed to talk about the creation of articles and guide the contributors about the good practices. However, I didn't know that there was a principle that boiled down to a very simple what I would like to talk about best practices for formatting articles. After a week of webcast while I was in class in University I met the Desgin Principles. At the exact moment that the teacher presented the principles, I remembered the TechNetWiki. In an unusual way, a College Advertising content had a relationship with TNWiki.

You will see that we have already used these principles, but did not know how to describe them. I hope the Design principle helps new contributors to structure your articles. So, this morning I includes a summary of this principle in our article: Wiki: What Makes a Great Wiki Article | Como Fazer um Excelente Artigo no Wiki:

 

Design Principles

An excellent article, in addition to appropriate and well-written content, also must follow a pattern of structuring and presentation of information. Each item of this pattern is described in the article User Experience Guidelines. However, you can always have in mind the four basic principles of design:

  • Alignment. Keep only one type of alignment on the text of the article. Note, for example, that throughout this article, the text is left aligned. Unaligned elements on a page are the sense of disarray.  
  • Repetition. The higher the repetition, the more the reader automatically identifies the content that he is seeking. This is a principle that helps to structure the content. Note that the repetition in the article ' how to make an excellent article in the Wiki ' was used in the following elements:  
    • The titles have the same pattern of presentation: Segoe Ui, 18, bold 
    • All the items in the lists are organized this way: Title. Description 
  • Contrast. Serves to highlight different elements. Note that the titles are in Bold and the font is larger than the rest of the text.  
  • Proximity. The relationship between the elements of a page creates the whole. In this way, how much closer are items related to each other, better readability. Imagine this text without any approximation of related content and without any formatting.  

 

 

 Ana Paula de Almeida  TechNet Profile | anapdealmeida.com |   @anapdealmeida

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