Hi everyone,

Kaity, Vibha and myself went out into the wild with the current Wikipedia Beta build, and tested the rolled-up disambiguation.

The test: we started out on The Sound of Music, the article about the musical. We then asked the user "Say you wanted to go to the article about the film rather than the musical. How would you do that?".

Of the five people tested, four of the five started scrolling like a madman and one went looking for the "index" (i.e. the table of contents). A few of them then said "Oh, I'll just search for the article" and started tapping interface elements like the ToC or overflow menu. None found search straight away. None found the "Other meanings text".

Although it's somewhat concerning that nobody found search straight away, I think it's important to view this finding in the context of the test, and not panic! Notably, there were several biases in the test that would disincline people from searching:

Users in testing scenarios like this are under pressure to try to find the quickest way to accomplish their goals, and tapping search and typing is never going to be quick.
We gave them the device already pointing at an article, so the context of the task heavily implied that we expected them to find their way to the new article from the current one rather than explicitly searching.
People may be iOS users so may not be familiar with how Android works in general.

That said, it did expose an interesting point. All of the functionality in the top bar is in the form of icons that you tap, except for search which is a flat text field. That's kind of weird. We should change that so that the interaction model for the top bar is consistent with... itself. ;-)

So, if you look at the wrapping up of article issues as "I want to get to the lead section faster when I first go to an article", it's a 100% success. On the other hand, if you still want people to actually use disambiguation, it may not be because nobody used it.

Here's the course of action I think we should try:

Change the prose slightly. Let's try "Similar articles".
Change the colour to make it clearer it's a link.

This course of action comes with a patch to implement it: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/159236/

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Garry

Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps

Wikimedia Foundation