hooray for mobile search improvements! yeah, we're talking about two
separate things, both of which could be valuable additions to our mobile
site from what we've seen:
* personal/device search history. it would be great to incorporate and
give priority to previously searched terms or visited pages. but i'd go
one step further and consider an explicit search history/page view
history/articles recently visited/ recent searches, especially for
smartphones and apps. in more active wikipedia readers, we noticed
existing habits doing this - sometimes it was a workaround using a browser
or devices bookmarking capabilities and other times it was a feature
offered in an app. in both cases, we observed that navigating to these
pages through these histories or bookmarks was *much* preferred to
retyping. to reiterate what others have already said: typing is costly.
on touchsreen devices, taps and scrolls are much cheaper. on non touch
screen devices, arrow or scroll downs are sometimes much cheaper
(blackberries) and sometimes only minorly cheaper.
* aggregate search history/trending topics. i think this would be most
appropriate in a smartphone/app scenario. generally speaking folks want to
search, find the article, get an understanding of a topic/find the piece of
information or answer they were looking for and move on from there.
discovery, browsing, and less directed interactions wikipedia do happen,
just far less frequently. which isn't to say that we can't enable it or
encourage it - but such offerings should not be included at the cost of
fast and easy access to search and navigation to a particular page.
but back to easier search. full screen focus for search is the way to go -
for all devices with larger screens!! and minimizing typing for all
devices (and all languages!!) as well, and i'm confident we can massage the
interaction to accomplish this along with autocomplete and search
suggestions. the transportability of this across languages, i am
completely uncertain of.....
one thing to add to the mix to consider: people frequently mention needing
just an overview or quick understanding of a top in their mobile scenarios.
we've discussed first paragraph preview or even a "mobile summary". i can
see it implemented here as an option to load (or otherwise view or preview)
the first paragraph or go to the full article. thoughts?
ok, one more thing to add to the mix: what of peoples google practices of
[searchterm] [wiki] or even just [searchterm], relying on the wikipedia
page being on of the top results. we'll have numbers in quantity from our
survey, but from our qualitative research, ~1/3 of folks reached the
wikipedia mobile site this way, not to mention carrying over from computer
practices. wapedia users are prompted when they click on a google search
result in the wikipedia namespace to either open the link in a browser or
open it in the app....something to consider when we're pondering search.
parul
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Tomasz Finc <tfinc(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Brandon Harris
<bharris(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Why not "trending topics" - pages that have been seeing lots of
traffic
in recent time?
I'm not sure how easily that would be to code up, though.
That might actually be more interesting then individual search
suggestions as our cache hit rate shows us that our users are very
similar.
--tomasz
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