Hello!
We’re pleased to announce that Jan Drewniak, a Discovery Department User
Experience Engineer, will be shifting to working on improving the user
interface and experience of search on desktop. He has been working
primarily on the
wikipedia.org portal site.
What does this mean for the future of wikipedia.org?
Let’s first review what we’ve done so far, just in this quarter (July -
August 2016): Jan worked on internationalization and localization of the
portal so that it could be translated easily (including the sister project
descriptive texts via translatewiki <https://translatewiki.net/>), pushing
minor bug fixes and enhancements as well as updating the articles by
language statistics. In addition, Jan also helped design and code the new
portal page layout (based on several prior successful A/B tests and
community input) to production.
Jan will continue to maintain the portal by fixing bugs, adding minor
enhancements and performing regular statistics updates; which is expected
to take (on average) a couple of hours a week. Otherwise, we are not
planning to do any significant new work on the portal for the next couple
of quarters. As per the annual plan
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery#Wikipedia.org_portal>,
the Discovery Portal Team committed to continue to improve the
wikipedia.org
page. We plan to resume that work in late Q3 and Q4 (March - July 2017).
What interface improvements will be made to search on desktop?
There’s been a lot of advances in search interfaces in Wikimedia in the
last few years. For example, the mobile apps, mobile web,
wikipedia.org,
VisualEditor, and Flow now use imagery and short descriptions to enhance
findability. With Jan’s help, we expect to launch similar improvements on
desktop as a beta feature, to gather feedback and collect data. Jan will
also be working on tidying up the interface of our recent launch of search
language detection
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/07/27/wikipedia-language-search/> to make
it more clear to searchers what’s happening.
Thank you! If you have any questions, please let us know.
Katie Horn, Director, Discovery
Dan Garry, Lead Product Manager, Discovery