On 21 August 2014 09:18, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru> wrote:
On 21.08.2014 14:26, Risker wrote:
On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu
<strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
...
I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the
"desktop" option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading;
others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference
in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was
in
North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many
of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure
available
to them.
So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these "navigation
aids"
in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them
by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell
us
whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other
articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we
need
to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for
mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider
their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of "meta data" tab from
articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though.
Risker/Anne
_______________________________________________
For me the conclusion would be not that we should drop them altogether in
the mobile version (most of them are useful navigation means after all) but
that the mobile version should be improved to parse them and to present
them as a piece of plain text, not as a template.
Many of these templates have over 100 links in them; a surprisingly large
number have "subtemplates" built into them. I'm having a hard time seeing
how adding all those links at the bottom of an article is actually going to
help that much. Unless we have some evidence to confirm this information is
actually useful to readers -seriously, this is a community-designed feature
targeted at readers as opposed to editors - it's probably time to rethink
what indirectly related information on our article pages is made routinely
available. We want people to use our information, not give up because it
takes too long to load.
Risker/Anne