Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
Data is important. It's also not always possible to gather. When
multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the
other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks.
But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or
a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are
people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more
clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is
that good or bad? If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage
links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to
scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's
obviously ridiculous.
As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be
hard to apply
correctly. Sometimes you really have to use judgment. But we could
still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click
interlanguage links? Do they usually understand the language they're
reading the article in, or not? We could have a little
multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time
when people click on an interlanguage link.
My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal. Yes,
people will see
it for what it is and they'll be able to find their language easily
enough if they look. But it's distracting, and it's not obvious
without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's anything
below it. If we could use some heuristic to pick a few languages to
display, with a prominent "More" link at the bottom, I suspect that
would be superior.
But first we should gather data on click rates for the
list fully
expanded and unexpanded. Per-page click rates are important here --
many articles have no interlanguage links, so will obviously pull down
the average click rate despite being unaffected by the change. What's
the trend like as articles have more interlanguage links? How many
more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty languages
as opposed to five? Can we plot that? For each wiki separately, for
preference?
All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of
course. Maybe the
usability team doesn't have the manpower. If so, does anyone
qualified volunteer? If not, we have to make decisions without data
-- and that doesn't automatically mean "keep the status quo", nor
"change it back if people complain loudly". It means someone who
happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a
judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available.
[...]
But why base only the decision for interlanguage links on
"click data"? A rough estimate would say that the "Edit"
button is used by far less than 1% as well. (Not to speak of
"View history" or the various fundraiser banners.) Yet, the
original grant explicitly stated as a *goal* to ease the
edit process.
So there is not only "evidence" to consider, but also
"policy". We do want to emphasize: "Everyone can edit!", so
we put an "Edit" button up there, even if it might disturb
someone's mind with "clutter". Do we want to advertize:
"This article is available in 100+ languages!", so someone
when reading another article without that long list will
think about translating this article to his mother tongue?
Or maybe just say: "Awesome!"
Tim