Hey Everyone,
A big shout out to the reading web team (and Adam B), who rolled out a
number of subtle, but important changes to the mobile web sites of all our
projects earlier this week.
Through a series of UX improvements, the team made it easier for people to
switch between languages in an article on mobile web. To all you
monolinguists out there, this is a very common and vital ability for people
who speak more than one language. In addition to being a big improvement
for our multi-lingual users, the development of this feature followed many
of the best practices we aspire to at the foundation:
- language switching on mobile initially discovered as a problem to be
solved through quantitative research
- tied to reading team's early strategic objective of better serving
global readers
- development stages included:
- community consultation
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Improve_in-article_language_switching_on_mobile_web#.5Bhistorical.5D_Help_us_choose_the_solution>
- iteration based on results
- a/b testing and analysis in beta
- qualitative research with live users
<https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/1gbqV0fDHUDJjDZgYNDY8aIrhJYdS5x4qvmWEJevgfGk/edit?usp=drive_web>
- iteration based on results
- collaboration with the language team (they are simultaneously
rolling out compact language links
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/Design/Interlanguage_links>
out
of beta on desktop)
- iteration based on collaboration
Am I missing anything? More on the project here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Improve_in-article_language_switching_on_mobile_web#Analysis>
and
a screenshot of the new language switching button is below
Best,
J