Yeah, I think there are a lot of problems with the opt-in beta model. I much prefer releasing new features to a small % of users, logging events/usage, and if we suspect something has the potential to be disruptive/offputting, letting them know the feature they're seeing is beta and letting them turn it off. 

That said, beta is still useful for sandboxing new features and in-person user testing, so I don't think we should kill it altogether. I just think we need to supplement it with a graduated release model – which we're already doing with stuff like WikiGrok :)

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Sam Smith <samsmith@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Have we thought about automatically opting people into beta mode e.g.
a sample of our users in a certain geographic region / certain zero
enabled area/ all users in a certain bucket based on their user id ?

I like this idea. In fact, I'm for it, provided that we make it clear to the user that they've been entered into an experiment and they're seeing non-standard UI.

How many users could beta actually handle?

Not sure. But, interestingly, we can find out by bucketing users and slowly assigning them the beta variant. 

Is this technically possible?

Yes. If we're generating and storing tokens on the client, which we do for anonymous users in other experiments, then we can enter anonymous users into the experiment at the cost of a little control over how tokens are stored.

If someone was bucketed into beta would they be able to opt out into
stable again under any of the above situations?

See my first inline response. We must make it clear to the user that they're seeing a variant of an experiment… and we must make it simple to opt out of the experiment.

Also, all instrumentation for beta features will need to be augmented with a is_beta_opt_in flag.

–Sam

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 10:18 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
One of the frustrations I have heard so far is that the audience there
is too small to get meaningful data around various experiments.
Currently people have to opt in by going to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileOptions which is hidden
away in the mobile interface. They can do this whilst anonymous or
logged in.

Have we thought about automatically opting people into beta mode e.g.
a sample of our users in a certain geographic region / certain zero
enabled area/ all users in a certain bucket based on their user id ?

How many users could beta actually handle?
Is this technically possible?
If someone was bucketed into beta would they be able to opt out into
stable again under any of the above situations?

Jon

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