Hey all,
This is a note of prior explanation about a small design enhancement
upcoming.
*## Background*
You might remember that part of the original Vector plans was to redesign
section edit links to make them more accessible to new contributors. (Look
at the Acai release on
usability.wikimedia.org).
Later on, Trevor collaborated with the Community Dept. to run an A/B test
on English Wikipedia of his redesign, which conclusively showed that the
new look increased both clicks and the net number of edits by a significant
amount.
At the time, there was no big push to productize the changes, but the code
has been sitting around inside the ClickTracking extension. My team became
the de facto maintainers of ClickTracking since we were its most heavy
users, and are now deprecating it in favor of EventLogging.
Skipping the big analytics discussion there, suffice it to say that we
don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and are working to
productize Trevor's road tested new design for section edit links in
Vector. (No change in Monobook et al.)
*## Plan of action*
Here's the plan for execution, which I've discussed with Howie Fung and
some of the design team so far:
1. We'll deploy the current version of the section edit redesign, which
you can see at
http://piramido.wmflabs.org/wiki/Hipster_ipsum. I've
committed to handling the necessary community announcements and final QA.
2. For the second iteration, Munaf and Vibha will work on a redesigned
icon to fit with Agora style, and we'll explore the idea Munaf had -- the
icons appearing only on hover in the section. It's a good one.
The current iteration is perhaps not perfect, but it was tested with users
and showed an improved conversion across the board. It also appears to be
using the previous localization message, so we can safely deploy it
everywhere Vector is in use.
The caveat Howie and I have discussed is the fact that no quality
measurements were done on the increase in editing. This change is really a
basic necessity as far as Product is concerned, so we aren't going to make
that a blocker, but should be prepared to roll it back if it makes the
wikis explode with vandalism etc.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/