On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Howie Fung <hfung@wikimedia.org> wrote:
For now, it's a perpetual link.  But I don't think that makes much sense long term.  I think the goals should be to inform the user when are beta features to try while minimizing nav clutter.  Fabrice has documented some ideas along these lines (e.g., only showing beta link when there are new features, Echo notifications): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features#Future_Releases

To be honest, I think this is a big issue with Beta Features, for the following reasons:
  1. It's already quite a cluttered menu, especially on flagship projects like enwiki and Commons, which add their own extras to the menu via JS (Sandbox and My uploads respectively).
  2. This is a very high value area with a lot of eyeballs, so changing or adding to it is something our users will have very vocal opinions about it. 
  3. All items in the personal toolbar are designed to be used very frequently, e.g. on a daily or weekly basis. BetaFeatures is not going to be used that frequently, unless we start adding to it every single week. We want people to see it, but it's significantly lower priority than ever other tool in there, IMO. 
  4. The pattern I am used to with beta or opt-in features is to see them in Preferences. Mobile does it this way, and so do other products like Gmail. We know Preferences is cluttered too, but this gives us extra reason to work on cleaning it up. 
  5. We have easy tools for driving people to Preferences sections, like guided tours and notifications. To my knowledge, we're already using or planning to use notifications to alert people about new beta features. If there is a visibility problem, we can use one or both of these new tools.
  6. If we have Beta there in the toolbar temporarily but remove it later, then we're teaching people to look somewhere and then changing it later arbitrarily. This exacts a cost on our users to relearn something. That's bad. 
  7. We constantly have to fight the urge for everyone to add to three spaces: personal toolbar, left sidebar, and top tabs. Every time we add stuff there, our ability to claim we're interested in simplification wanes. 
All in all, I think these reasons suggest we have to be very clear that we think BetaFeatures is important enough that it merits longterm placement in the personal toolbar. From what I've heard, it doesn't sound like we really do want it there, but we're doing so far lack of better ideas. 

As I hint at in my comments, I think the right way to approach this is to put something as a tab in Preferences and be noisy about driving all users to it with notifications and guided tours. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager