Hey Everyone, A big shout out to the reading web team (and Adam B), who rolled out a number of subtle, but important changes to the mobile web sites of all our projects earlier this week.
Through a series of UX improvements, the team made it easier for people to switch between languages in an article on mobile web. To all you monolinguists out there, this is a very common and vital ability for people who speak more than one language. In addition to being a big improvement for our multi-lingual users, the development of this feature followed many of the best practices we aspire to at the foundation:
- language switching on mobile initially discovered as a problem to be solved through quantitative research - tied to reading team's early strategic objective of better serving global readers - development stages included: - community consultation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Improve_in-article_language_switching_on_mobile_web#.5Bhistorical.5D_Help_us_choose_the_solution - iteration based on results - a/b testing and analysis in beta - qualitative research with live users https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/1gbqV0fDHUDJjDZgYNDY8aIrhJYdS5x4qvmWEJevgfGk/edit?usp=drive_web - iteration based on results - collaboration with the language team (they are simultaneously rolling out compact language links https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/Design/Interlanguage_links out of beta on desktop) - iteration based on collaboration
Am I missing anything? More on the project here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Improve_in-article_language_switching_on_mobile_web#Analysis and a screenshot of the new language switching button is below
Best,
J