Once upon a time, a man called David had an idea for a way to make search better. So he hacked together a little thing and put it in Labs: http://suggesty.wmflabs.org/suggest.html. You guessed it, that turned into the completion suggester that over ten thousand users are trialling as a beta feature. So, yes, setting up some spaces in Labs to do experimental work is a great idea! :-)
The important thing for me to note is that experimental work, like any other work, should be tracked in Phabricator, prioritised by the relevant product owner (Deb in this case), and have clear deliverables. This makes sure we're not just building prototypes for the sake of it because they look awesome and make us feel good, and makes the tradeoffs involved (experimental vs A/B test) more clear.
Naming: I like Portal Labs, because the URL will almost certainly end up looking something like portal.wmflabs.org, portal-2.wmflabs.org, and so on, and that's already got the word labs in there. ;-)
Thanks, Dan
On 22 January 2016 at 17:58, Julien Girault jgirault@wikimedia.org wrote:
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: https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/
Pay closer attention to: Trending Showing top 9 articles (grid) https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/react-top9-cards/Trending Showing top 10 articles (full screen) https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/react-top10-fs/
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
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