The Discovery Portal team has been thinking about a Portal Labs page.
The idea is that we can implement some revolutionary ideas for our portal page, things that are completely different than what the current portal page looks like, and deploy it on this site for real users to use. But without imposing a disruptive user experience to our users. We can put a link to this page on the production portal page (in the bottom?), and users can have an option to bookmark the page, and maybe make one of the experiments their default.
We would have two trains:
- Slow train: running regular A/B tests (like the one we just ran) on the official portal page and deploying small improvements as we learn.
- Faster train: "Revolutionary" prototypes in Labs where we also collect traffic and clickthrough rate to measure user satisfaction. We can also implement a "Send a Feedback" feature (or have a link on the prototype page that points to a Phab ticket where community can add comments/feedback).
To give you an example of what we mean by revolutionary ideas, I uploaded some of my research time work:
Pay closer attention to:
Trending Showing top 9 articles (grid)
Trending Showing top 10 articles (full screen)
This would allow us to think outside the box and test different layouts/features, with real users who chose to.
This is kind of a crazy idea, and we want to know what you all think about it. Also we would need some naming ideas for it. Portal labs, or beta portal, or something else.
Please let us know what you think about this, how you think we can go towards making this happen and what we should name it.
Thanks!
Julien