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

[Liam Wyatt]

On 19 April 2011 11:59, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
>
>  Indeed. As the rest of the web gets prettier and prettier, MediaWiki risks
> starting to look like an ugly duckling...
>

This, and more general external trends, is what the WMF's "product
whitepaper" talks about here:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper#External_Trends
which concludes:

"We can hypothesize that users who started editing Wikipedia during the
2001-2006 time period were accustomed to a very different web environment
than users who start to edit Wikipedia today. There simply weren’t easy, yet
powerful, WYSIWYG editors to enable the types of publishing that are present
today, and in general, web applications were less intuitive, less social,
and less responsive.... Today's Internet users have many more ways to
contribute and interact on the web than they did 5 and 10 years ago. A
deeper understanding of how Wikimedia sits within this "competitive"
environment is likely an important step in understanding editor trends."


-Liam