Thanks everyone, for the thoughtful comments!

I love that his research is helping us iterate toward providing usable and useful offline functionality for people, and making space for some thoughtful cross (Reading) team conversations about cross platform concepts (the star and messaging specifics). 

Maybe at some point, there could be a cross platform (apps, mobile web, desktop), workshop focused specifically on the star icon, it's many meanings in our context, and how to conceive of the star considering it's history and meaning in other web contexts (youtube, google etc). Of course it would be important to have community involved.  I will leave this to you on the Reading team. 

Anne and I are currently working with a partner in India on the next round of testing. Expect a second report toward the end of Feb, beginning of March! 

Abbey

On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 12:28 PM, Joshua Minor <jminor@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Can't help but pile on on this small point in a very broad range of useful insights...

The apps used to use a heart for saving pages. Apart from being a bit off brand (hearts are cutesy and "social", not referencey and serious), it was also presumed to be a "favorites" system, rather than a bookmarking/save-for-later/download symbol. It seems like bookmark's semantics are too narrow (bookmarking/list making) to cover "saving offline", but any symbol that has to do double duty of conveying both bookmarking/list-making/favoriting AND "download for later use" will be hard, as these two functions are not usually bound up with each other in most platforms (favoriting a youtube video doesn't download it, downloading an image doesn't add it to an organized list of favorites, etc). 

I also have some other thoughts on the findings abot whether the web and where user's mental models of web and apps support storing things locally for offline use. I will just say that "save to app" from web is a possibility on both platforms, if users get to content from web (Uncle Google!), but expect storage to happen with apps. But, I am a bit biased there, so perhaps best left to future iterations by the New Readers group to sort that one out...


On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 12:07 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:


On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 7:51 AM Anne Gomez <agomez@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks Nick. We'll keep your feedback about the star in mind as we go forward. The thing that we're really noticing is that the star is pretty confusing to people, especially when paired with another icon with somewhat similar intuitive meaning. If you look at the prototypes, you can see how this is confusing, particularly for autowiki (now saved pages). 

This is also consistent with what  the former mobile team discovered when we released the watchstar to mobile   [1,2] . To our readers it clearly means favorite.. just as stars do on other websites.


We'll see what we get from the second round of testing, but if we do go down the "saved pages" path, this is something we'll likely want to address.

Anne

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 5:36 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks Abbey - super interesting. 

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 13:06 Anne Gomez <agomez@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yay! Thanks so much, Abbey. This has been a great learning experience - both in terms of product takeaways and also in terms of process for these regions.

Looking forward to continuing to learn and iterate as we go forward.

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 12:57 PM, Abbey Ripstra <aripstra@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Everybody! 

Here is the report for this study, where we tested three (online to offline) ideas with a set of users we could reach from here in SF. 

Please check it out, and respond here with any questions, thoughts, interesting info that could inform our thinking further, etc. A few things to note: 

  • The feedback in this report has already been incorporated into the prototypes, where needed for our next round of research. (Thanks reading web team!)
  • We will continue the testing in India because it is MUCH easier to reach our target users there.
  • We will build on the set of learnings in this report with the outcomes of the research in India.
  • The recruit for research in India is starting now, and testing will begin within a week or so. 
  • We will upload this to commons and can post it in the next update
More to follow! 

--
Abbey Ripstra  
Lead Design Researcher \\ Wikimedia Foundation               
M +1 773 412 7463

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the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!



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Anne Gomez // Reading Product Manager, New Readers
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-Toby



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Anne Gomez // Reading Product Manager, New Readers
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate.


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