On 21 August 2014 09:18, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On 21.08.2014 14:26, Risker wrote:
On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
...
I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the "desktop" option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading; others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was in North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure available to them.
So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these "navigation aids" in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell us whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we need to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of "meta data" tab from articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though.
Risker/Anne _______________________________________________
For me the conclusion would be not that we should drop them altogether in the mobile version (most of them are useful navigation means after all) but that the mobile version should be improved to parse them and to present them as a piece of plain text, not as a template.
Many of these templates have over 100 links in them; a surprisingly large number have "subtemplates" built into them. I'm having a hard time seeing how adding all those links at the bottom of an article is actually going to help that much. Unless we have some evidence to confirm this information is actually useful to readers -seriously, this is a community-designed feature targeted at readers as opposed to editors - it's probably time to rethink what indirectly related information on our article pages is made routinely available. We want people to use our information, not give up because it takes too long to load.
Risker/Anne