User blog:Belle pullman/Character Gallery Overhaul?

I've been thinking for a while, the character galleries need some work... (maybe not adding all the missing pics until I've re-named files that need to be re-named though, perhaps?!)  They can be massive pages for the most popular characters, and is the current heading system the most user-friendly? What can be improved?

Over on the Starlight wiki, we've split the character galleries for the main characters into four sections - but then Starlight Express worldwide productions conveniently split into London, USA, Germany, and "other". Cats has had more productions and the "families" of productions are less immediately apparent to the user. But we could split up the galleries if there's a simple and intuitive system...

Looking at Victoria/Gallery as an example, the use of headings and sub-headings is inconsistent - with the US Tours individually labelled, the German productions each given a heading, but the Japanese and Australian productions don't... But when there's maybe 40 different productions, is that not too much for the table of contents?!

Also at the moment, non-replica and regional productions are not included in the gallery - and I'm not proposing we start adding them, unless we were to split the galleries into multiple sections and have a section dedicated to "Not John Napier's Designs". At the moment the problem is there's so much data, how best to organise it, throwing more irregular data in there will make it worse! We also need to be consistent across all the character galleries.

The key element is ease of use by our readers. More readers are on mobile than on computers, so it's vital to remember that everything needs to work well on a small phone screen. Are people browsing through looking at different versions of the characters, are they looking for a particular reference, are they looking for their favourite performer, or a particular cast they saw?

So, any thoughts, ideas on how to improve the character galleries? Do we change up the headings? Do we change the order productions appear in? What will make the galleries easier to use?

UPDATE:
So I've been looking over, and what I think will work best, is splitting the galleries by decade. It's super straight forward, I don't think there's any chance of confusion - apart from the long-running productions that spanned both the 1980s and 1990s. But what I've done for the prototype is simply add (see 1980s) to the 1990s, having left the title in place.

Demeter/Gallery1980s

So, here's the prototype for Demeter. In implementing this - or splitting by Region is the other option but I'm not keen for the possibility of confusion on tours - does it require a "splash" page, an index that simply contains the links for the different galleries, or does having the links top and bottom fulfil the navigation need?

I mean - I've just linked to the 1980s page there. If you wanted the 2000s, would you feel you were on the wrong page, or would it be a convenient step to just click the link at the top there?

I'm also not sure about the repetition of the designs. I personally find it fascinating to compare the real costumes with the designs - but having the design in both the infobox and the first gallery feels redundant. But then, what else would go in the infobox?

Overall I think this is a winning solution, we just need to iron out the last few queries and make sure it works properly!