Hi folks, The multimedia team completed a review of Media Viewer in recent weeks, and we'd like to share a few highlights of what we learned from this project in 2014. 1. Research Here are some key findings from our research about this product: • Media Viewer serves a lot more images than before (17M intentional views/day) • Most users keep Media Viewer enabled (99.5% enabled) • Media Viewer key features were found easy to use • Media Viewer is more useful for readers than active editors More information can be found in this Media Viewer Research 2014 report: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Research_2014 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Research_2014> See also these companion slides for a visual presentation of more findings: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_Research_-_2014_Slides… <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Media_Viewer_Research_-_2014_Slides.pdf> 2. Retrospective The multimedia team also discussed lessons learned from this project in 2014, identifying what worked and what didn’t work, in order to inform future product development. Here are some highlights of that team review. The Media Viewer project ran from July 2013 to November 2014 and was more challenging than expected. While the product received favorable or neutral feedback on most Wikimedia sites, it was met with negative reactions from many contributors on the English and German Wikipedias, as well as on Wikimedia Commons. This caused the team to work longer than planned, to improve features based on user feedback. What worked well: • Detailed activity and performance metrics. • Design research -- before and after implementing a feature. • Working with community champions in different projects. • Agile development process and tools. • Unit tests to improve the code. What didn't work well: • Many community discussions did not effectively inform product development. • Surveys were not representative, because they were optional. • We lacked the tools to get productive feedback from different user groups. • Juggling feature and platform development at the same time was hard. • Scope creep; the workload kept growing beyond available resources. • No clear success metric; we couldn't tell if we had met our goal. More findings can be found in this Media Viewer Retrospective summary: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Retrospective Please let us know if you have any questions about this research or retrospective. You’re also welcome to add your feedback on the Media Viewer talk page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Media_Viewer/About#Media_View… I'm grateful to all the team members who worked on these documents, especially Gergő and Gilles. These findings can help us better understand how Media Viewer serves our users — and how we can improve not only this product but also our development and release process. This will be my last post on behalf of the multimedia team, as I have now transitioned into a new role at the Wikimedia Foundation, working as Movement Communications Manager. Senior engineer Gilles Dubuc is now leading the multimedia team and can answer questions related to upcoming projects. I’d like to thank all the community members who worked closely with us on this project, as well as my colleagues on the multimedia and product teams. We learned a lot together, and I really enjoyed creating a better product with you all. I look forward to more collaborations in coming years. Regards as ever, Fabrice _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Movement Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)