Bit confused with what's being requested here, specifically:

• what is the 3rd icon in that tool bar that looks like a page?
• we won't have an overflow menu until T216418. I can't do any analysis on this task till such a menu is in place. I suspect there is a parent task that's not associated with this one yet.

@Jdlrobson the request here is to include a Contributions action/icon in the toolbar ("the 3rd icon in that tool bar that looks like a page"), and to move the History action/icon to the overflow menu.

Okay, understood but the overflow menu doesn't exist yet so we won't be able to do that for some time.

The contributions icon is not recognisable to me to be honest and inconsistent with desktop which uses a black silhouette. I also think many users would get confused by the inconsistent placement of history. Given our history of unrecognizable icons and undiscoverable history links is there any user research we can do in the mean time?

@Jdlrobson great feedback all around. So perhaps we just leave the History icon in the same location and add Contributions to the overflow for User pages? My thinking was that History is less useful than Contributions on User pages...

If we cant do user research having input from Chris and Tilman would be helpful but my guess is history is more important to an editor. Contributions pages tend to be reached from diffs, recent changes, history... in desktop there is no way to get from a user page to contributions directly.

Pedanticism alert!

in desktop there is no way to get from a user page to contributions directly.

Not true my friend. When visiting a user page on desktop (in Vector and Monobook) there is a link in the sidebar that points you to the User contributions special page. It's in the Tools subsection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CKoerner_(WMF)

But generally, I'd agree that if you have a limited number of slots in the menu, the History page is more important. But only slightly. :)

@CKoerner_WMF thanks for pointing that out.

@Tbayer is it possible for us to find out: for a logged-in user on desktop, from a Userpage are they more likely to navigate to History or to Contributions? @Jdlrobson makes a good point about consistency, so I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should base the design on the data entirely, but would be good to know if possible.

Wow totally blind to that link (and links in that menu in general😂).

In T219402#5085249, @alexhollender wrote:

@CKoerner_WMF thanks for pointing that out.

@Tbayer is it possible for us to find out: for a logged-in user on desktop, from a Userpage are they more likely to navigate to History or to Contributions? @Jdlrobson makes a good point about consistency, so I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should base the design on the data entirely, but would be good to know if possible.

I did a quick check for a recent week on enwiki and dewiki. Based on our webrequest referer data, the Contributions link is actually almost twice as popular as the History link on enwiki, and almost three times as popular on dewiki:

Based on my own editor experience, this makes sense: You go to a user page to find out more about that user. After seeing the content of that user page, you are still more likely to be interested in what a user has contributed in general recently than how they may have changed one particular page (that user page).

Data from

SELECT 
ROUND( 
  SUM(100*IF(uri_query = CONCAT('?title=User:',username,'&action=history'),1,0))/SUM(1)
, 2) AS history_pc,
ROUND(
  SUM( 100*IF(uri_path = CONCAT('/wiki/Special:Contributions/',username),1,0))/SUM(1)
, 2) AS contrib_pc,
SUM(1) AS all_clicks
FROM (
  SELECT 
  uri_path, uri_query,
  SUBSTR(referer, LENGTH('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:')+1) AS username
  FROM wmf.webrequest
  WHERE year = 2019 AND month = 3 AND day >= 25
  AND x_analytics_map['loggedIn'] IS NOT NULL
  AND referer LIKE '%/wiki/User:%'
  AND referer NOT LIKE '%/wiki/User:%/%' -- exclude sub pages
  AND referer NOT LIKE '%action=%' -- exclude edit / redlink pages 
  AND pageview_info['project'] = 'en.wikipedia'
  AND agent_type = 'user'
  AND access_method = 'desktop') AS clicks
;
history_pc	contrib_pc	all_clicks
6.48	11.61	102268
Time taken: 840.607 seconds, Fetched: 1 row(s)

SELECT 
ROUND( 
  SUM(100*IF(uri_query = CONCAT('?title=Benutzer:',username,'&action=history'),1,0))/SUM(1)
, 2) AS history_pc,
ROUND(
  SUM( 100*IF(uri_path = CONCAT('/wiki/Spezial:Beitr%C3%A4ge/',username),1,0))/SUM(1)
, 2) AS contrib_pc,
SUM(1) AS all_clicks
FROM (
  SELECT 
  uri_path, uri_query,
  SUBSTR(referer, LENGTH('https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:')+1) AS username
  FROM wmf.webrequest
  WHERE year = 2019 AND month = 3 AND day >= 25
  AND x_analytics_map['loggedIn'] IS NOT NULL
  AND referer LIKE '%/wiki/Benutzer:%'
  AND referer NOT LIKE '%/wiki/Benutzer:%/%' -- exclude sub pages
  AND referer NOT LIKE '%action=%' -- exclude edit / redlink pages 
  AND pageview_info['project'] = 'de.wikipedia'
  AND agent_type = 'user'
  AND access_method = 'desktop') AS clicks
;
OK
history_pc	contrib_pc	all_clicks
4.39	12.73	36524
Time taken: 1646.464 seconds, Fetched: 1 row(s)

In T219402#5079499, @Jdlrobson wrote:

...

The contributions icon is not recognisable to me to be honest

Agreed - earlier, this (or a similar icon, part of the "Wikifont" effort some years ago) has rather been used to evoke "content" in the movement, see e.g. this or this example.

and inconsistent with desktop which uses a black silhouette.

That black silhouette icon on desktop indicates your own user links (user page, notifications, talk page... ), not contributions of other users.

In T219402#5087309, @Tbayer wrote:

In T219402#5085249, @alexhollender wrote:

@Tbayer is it possible for us to find out: for a logged-in user on desktop, from a Userpage are they more likely to navigate to History or to Contributions? @Jdlrobson makes a good point about consistency, so I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should base the design on the data entirely, but would be good to know if possible.

I did a quick check for a recent week on enwiki and dewiki. Based on our webrequest referer data, the Contributions link is actually almost twice as popular as the History link on enwiki, and almost three times as popular on dewiki:

PS: emphasis on "quick" here; to note a few data caveats: There are still some questions about the accuracy of the referrer data in general. Also, in case of a user viewing their own user page, the above numbers for contributions page clicks can't distinguish between the link in the side bar (to the contributions of the user page owner) and the link on top right (to the viewer's own contributions). My guess is that this case only comprises a minority of user page views, based on e.g. the main purpose of user pages being described as interpersonal communication in community documentation pages like this. But there are definitely some editors who use their user page for their own work notes, as well as some (newbies in particular, as @MMiller_WMF has observed in his team's data on new editors' first steps) "ego-surfing" back to the text they wrote about themselves. (For privacy reasons, the webrequest data doesn't record the viewing user's user name. So there is no direct way to determine the ratio of self-views, although there may be some indirect ways to get an estimate - I might look into this at some point.) Directly instrumenting link clicks via EventLogging like in T220016 will often yield more reliable data, but it seems that this would be overkill here.