Hi,
I'm not at all concerned about the rate at which you iterate -- it isn't about how fast you put out the shiny and new, but whether the assumptions that motivate this big undertaking are testable and falsifiable. Before we can say anything with confidence about what newcomers truly need, we need to do some usability testing and research. Because newcomers are generally voiceless, there is an unconscious tendency to project onto them a set of subjective preferences and intuitions, and the only way around that is data.
I don't know if this is useful in this context but because of the term "usability testing" I thought this extension might be interesting for you: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UIFeedback
This project is still under development and we haven't gotten through code and design review yet…
--Claudia
-- Ori Livneh
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