Wikimedia Commons gets user galleries

Wikimedia Commons gets user galleries
A long-awaited feature added by volunteer developer Bryan Tong Minh.
A long-awaited feature added by volunteer developer Bryan Tong Minh.
Our volunteers are awesome. More specifically, Magnus Manske is awesome. He just made reusing pictures from Wikimedia Commons a hundred times easier.
Over the past few months, I’ve been coordinating the preparation of a formal User experience (UX) study for the Multimedia usability project. Basically, it means observing how “real” users interact with the Wikimedia Commons in order to improve it. Videos of the testing have now been published in order to share them with the community.
Three weeks ago, I attended the KDE Akademy 2010 conference in Tampere, Finland. Besides the talk Parul Vora and I gave to share experience about User experience, I also took this opportunity to meet with the KDE community and discuss collaboration opportunities.
Over the years, the design of MediaWiki has been solely driven by software developers. This has caused an unfortunate technology-based approach of the front-end and the features (implemented or missing), relying mostly on the implementation model. The consequence is that the interface & features are too far from the users’ mental model. The Wikipedia and Multimedia Usability projects have tried to address the most pressing concerns resulting from this hiatus between the software and the users’ expectations.
Do you regularly use media sharing platforms like Flickr, Youtube, Fotopedia, Picasa web or Panoramio? Then you can tell us what you love (or hate) about their interface and features, to help us improve Wikimedia Commons.
I follow a set of RSS feeds related to user experience and interaction design. Until now, I have been reading them for my own benefit; but with my new job, it makes sense to pick a few interesting pieces of information for Wikimedians who want to better understand the work of the Wikimedia usability team(s).
Where our hero makes an early Christmas wishlist and implores the developer fairies to give Wikimedia Commons some much-needed love.