I want to discuss the points needed to get to (b). The Book Creator tool is great, and I think is the exact right type of tool to meet the needs of our readers; but there is much room for improvements. Right now, I personally find the experience getting to and from the Book Creator tool to be not as straight forward as would be most beneficial. As this service has such a huge demand, I think there are some opportunities for the refining of the "book creator" tool and process. I'd love thoughts on the following and more:
- Rebranding: What are our thoughts on the title "Book Creator"? I wonder if the title itself is a bit confusing, since people are apparently unaware of the ability to download as PDF at all! Plus, I personally don't utilize the tools as a means for creating an actual book, though I recognize this was the initial purpose: I view it as a way to read a couple specific articles offline. I think using the word "collection," which we do informally anyway, is likely more appropriate here. Perhaps "Offline Collection Creator" or "Article Aggregator" (both terrible ideas, I know, but I'm just throwing things out there:))
The title "Book Creator" is not carved in stone. We played around with other wordings like "save for reading later". But I think the collection feature needs more than better wording.
- Website placement: I think it is obvious the space the Book Creator takes on the Left Hand tool bar is not enough to draw attention to the feature. I wonder if we should attempt to have some sort of a "Save for Offline Use" button on each article, which would then open a new window into the collection creator screen? This could look similar to the "Share this" links which exist on most information websites (for Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). This could be next to the "Print" button.
I totally agree with you that the space in the left hand tool bar is far from ideal. Moreover, the whole process for starting the "Book creator" is too cumbersome and wordy. How about something like the feedback box that could appear on the bottom of every page? But of course it would be nicer to have something that appears "above the fold".
So far I was not aware that there was a "Print" button in Wikipedia (new skin?). If such a button existed, it would probably also be a great place for the functionality.
- Marketing: Once we feel a bit more confident about usability, it would be great to market the tool. We can do this in three phases:
- Phase 1: emails to different mailing lists announcing the project, and asking for suggestions and feedback on the tools
We could set up a little project team that takes the input from the community and creates some ui prototypes. Usually, you get more qualified feedback if you confront users with a wireframe or a rough draft. When we feel confident about the basic design we could implement the new features and go for tests with a wider audience just as you suggested.
- Phase 2: "pilot" testing of the tool, with banner advertising to logged-in users
- Phase 3: advertise this functionality via a banner at the top of Wikipedia!
That would be great! But we should only do this, once we have a better UI in place. Otherwise it would be just a flash in the pan.
- Measurement: clearly, we should have careful tracking of books created and downloads by file type by day. @PediaPress: is this available yet?
There are a few reports that are easily available (like total number of downloads) and some that are a little more difficult to retrieve (like downloads by file type). But so far none of this is available in public repositories. I think we should implement a reporting infrastructure where everybody can check the usage statistics (similar to
http://stats.grok.se/).
But before we set up a reporting system we should decide what our goals for the redesign are and how we could measure them.