[Foundation-l] A designer? (was: Better user experience and retention through e-mail notifications)

[Milos Rancic]

MZMcBride's email about emails reminded me that every automated email
from Wikimedia servers looks like a bunch of programming code.

The first idea was that it would be better to have some better formatted
emails with some more information (for example, I would like to see diff
inside of my email when I get notification about changing my talk page).

But, then I've realized that we don't have a designer. By "designer" I
mean a person who is employed by WMF and who is constantly working on
improving MediaWiki look and feel.

While a lot of us may be completely fine with reading Wikipedia articles
through links, there are people who care about look and feel.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Foundation-l] Better user experience and retention through
e-mail	notifications
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 01:55:10 -0500
From: MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com>
Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

Hi.

I'm not sure about other people, but one of the primary reasons I get on
Facebook is that Facebook reminds me to get on. It sends notification
e-mails about a Wall post or a comment or whatever. Without these, I
wouldn't check it more than once every few days.

There's been a lot of talk about getting new editors and keeping them. I
would think something like working e-mail notifications would be a high
priority. There are plenty of features and enhancements that could improve
the user experience and user retention/return, but this piece of fruit seems
particularly low-hanging.

Even on some Wikimedia wikis, it's the e-mail notifications that get me to
go back to the site. I only ever visit strategy.wikimedia.org when someone
edits my talk page, as it triggers an e-mail notification to me. The smaller
sites have had these types of notifications for a long time. The
notification system is built in to MediaWiki, it's just not enabled on
larger sites such as the English Wikipedia. It's being tracked by bug
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5220>.

MZMcBride



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