On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 11:41 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I concur that there's a bit much reasoning from no
data, and we could
do with some.
Anecdotally, (a) I don't mind the new viewer (b) I know a lot of
people who've said they love it (c) I know a few who've said they hate
it. So yeah, real user surveys needed!
We do have user surveys for MediaViewer and did advertise them quite
prominently (see design notes
<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/261>
and analysis of results
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey>; they ran
for about a month on enwiki). They turned out to be not so useful; there
was usually a large number of responses right after the launch, which were
predominantly negative, and a smaller number of predominantly positive
responses after that. That can be interpreted in very different ways -
could be change aversion, with most users warming up to the new interface
after a week or two; it could the effect of bugfixes and added features
(after every rollout we quickly fixed the most reported problems); it could
even be possible that most users don't like the tool and those who do wait
longer before responding for some reason. Also, editors are still way
overrepresented (in the enwiki survey results respondents self-identifying
as noneditors / casual editors / active editors are somewhere around 40% /
40% / 20%, while the actual ratio is more like 99% / 0.99% / 0.1%), with
the more underrepresented groups having a significantly more positive
opinion.