Note: I intended to send this to this mailing list last week. Apologies for the delay and duplication.
Hello,
Hovercards, currently a beta feature, is nearing release. [0] We'd like to
encourage communities to adopt Hovercards as a default option for
logged-out readers. [1] Hovercards provide a preview of any linked article,
giving readers a quick understanding of a related article without leaving
the current page. The Reading web team recently completed a series of A/B
tests to gather information on how Hovercards are used.
* April 2015 - Catalan and Greek A/B test results [2]
* Summer/Fall 2016 Hungarian, Italian, and Russian Wikipedia A/B test
results [3]
* 2016 Reading team UX research [4]
As you can see the results of the tests were generally positive. A few key
highlights:
* During the Catalan and Greek A/B test, 79% of respondents either Agreed
or Strongly Agreed that Hovercards were easy to use, 76% of respondents
either Agreed or Strongly Agreed that Hovercards were useful for their
needs.
* Users are viewing approximately 0.99 hovercards per session, and
interacting with approximately 31% more pages each session. [5]
* The disable rate was very low: the rate of clicking the settings cog for
Hovercards was 0.02% for Hungarian, 0.034% for Italian, and 0.016% for
Russian Wikipedia. The rates for disabling the feature were even lower.
* In our qualitative tests, 13 out of 15 questionnaire participants
reported positive experiences with Hovercards.
== Rollout plan ==
The next step for Hovercards is to develop a plan for rolling the feature
out to all projects. We have created a draft proposal for which projects to
discuss Hovercards with and approximate timeline for deployments. [6]
The Reading Web team will be reaching out to the communities in the order
listed above to discuss how to implement the feature. We want to enable the
feature by default for logged-out users and we will respect the current
beta feature preferences for logged-in users.
Questions and feedback welcome at Beta Features/Hovercards. [7]
Thank you for your time.
[1] Logged-out users would see Hovercards by default on wikis that opt-in.
Logged-out users may turn Hovercards off via the cog-icon displayed at the
bottom of each Hovercard. Logged-in users see Hovercards if they have
enabled the feature. New accounts created after the launch of Hovercards
would have it on by default (mimicking the default for logged-out users)
with the option to disable in Special:Preferences.
[4]
[5] With page interactions defined as the sum of average hovercards viewed
per session and average pages viewed per session
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison - Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation