[Foundation-l] [Announcement] Extension of user experience work

[Naoko Komura]

Dear Delphine, Aphaia, Mike and those who congratulated us off the list,

Thank you for your kind words and encouragements.  We, the user experience programs team, are very excited and grateful to be able to continue improving the usability and user experience of Wikimedia projects.  

The Stanton usability project is in the final phase, but we are still developing one of the most complicated features we worked so far,    collapsing and form-based templates.  We are faced with a lot of challenges, but we hope to be able to share the prototype in coming weeks.

The success of the usability initiative so far could not have been possible without the strong support and constructive critiques from the community members who constantly participated in design discussion, prototype testing, provided feedback through the beta survey.  I also want to acknowledge various community members who not only raised the usability to be address as high priority task, but actually took actions in improving the usability since 2005.  To name a few, Openusability.org conducted usability study with Ellen Reitmayr in Germany in 2006 and published the result.  Robert Stojnic implemented the proposed search result page in a matter of weeks after the mock-up was uploaded to the usability wiki. Kozuch and Mephiles602 constantly helped maintain the usability wiki in addition to participating the discussion of new features and designs.  Nihiltres, who was the member of 2005 WikiProject Usability, reminded us when our beta stopped working on iPhone.  Cbrown tested RTL display and files a bug.  Aphia found a bug in Japanese prototype.  Cary and Mike jumped in when there were severe incidents of vandalism on the usability wiki.  They all contributed more than my simple list here, but what I want to say is they all made a difference in our project.  The list goes on and on, and I am only naming a few folks here, who came to my mind while I type this email.  (Forgive me for the names I have omitted here in advance.)  

Multimedia usability project continues while the Stanton usability team shifts the focus from simplifying the editing interface to rich text editor and a research of social interactive component of the user experience.  Strategy Planning Team published rich contents under Community Health, which we will be studying carefully and determine which area we should focus first.  

Thanks again for your encouragements.  It is great to be part of the permanent member of the Wikimedia community. :-)

Cheers,

- Naoko







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