Adding notes from today’s conversations:

• JW:
  • Use empty state to indicate to users that there are results in other app languages
• CG:
  • 3% goal is difficult to reach
    • RS: Formulate it more broadly or remove it
  • Will leave further comments in the slide deck or here on Phab
• DB
  • Flags that including search results from history could result in users beeing in a search bubble.
    • RS:
      • Add avoiding this as a “goal” or what we don’t want to slide deck / Phab
      • Limit results of history to avoid it. Mentioned in slide deck.
  • Talks about adding “Search” as an icon in the app bar of “My lists” and “History”, in addition to the filter icon
    • RS: To consider — could be redundant if we also add it to the tab bar
• Android Team:
  • Considering that we’re looking for tasks to work on — we’re working with design and Android team feedback for this and won’t perform an internal survey (which takes more time)
  • CG and RS will add analytics questions to this task.
  • RS will work on specs and prepare task specs by Thursday.

Adding @alexhollender’s comments from Slack:

• Looks awesome — huge support for Search in the toolbar, and for the double tap to bring the keyboard up (it bothers me so much when apps don’t do this!)
• Random idea:
  • What about some “magic words” like being able to type “Yesterday” or “My lists”
  • Or Random would be a cool easter egg
  • Like if you could type Random and then it returned a list of random articles

Hey @Charlotte, thought about the points we discussed at our 1:1 on Friday.

Use house icon and Home terminology instead of world icon and Explore label in article overflow menu

This sounded like a good idea to me before the weekend. I gave it some more thought this morning and am hesitant to introduce one more notion to the app’s current concept. When we want to introduce new terminology like Home instead of Explore, it needs to be done on an app(s) level. Definitely worth considering renaming Explore to Home on both iOS and Android - but it does not make sense to do it just in one menu. Should we create a separate task for this?

Do we need to show the forward button or not?

Showing it only when it’s available, as per the task’s description is IMO the way to go. We’re already making use of the app being some sort of (Wikipedia) browser, as we’re using tabs, search, links, etc. I think Forward definitely has its right to exist.

Thx!

Presented the ideas to @Johan and chatted a bit about the suggestions in T259717 and T259795

• Side note from JJ: search is extremely difficult area because we got used to the best search functions out there (from Google)
• Had the idea to combine the magnifying glass with lists or history icon to make it more clear that a user is searching in the respective scope.
• About the new language icon + label in the toolbar (T259795)
  • JJ is a fan of the change, since he always have to explain to people where they can change the language
  • Conversation with JJ lead to the idea to use the name of the language. But it could lead to longer labels in certain languages.
  • RS mentions A/B testing it. Though unsure if a qualitative test would bring us more insights.
  • The world “Language” is not a word that becomes long in many languages, e.g.:
    • Sprache (German)
    • Langue (French)
    • Språk (Swedish) (side TIL → the å can be called “overring”)
• One thing that immediately comes to my mind when looking at the mountain example in T259717:
  • If there’s a perfect hit like “Mountain”, that should be the first result
  • No strong opinion about first word match or “containing"
  • RS will try to define the search result “algorithm” a bit better

Thanks for the conversation!

In T256819#6372133, @schoenbaechler wrote:

Hey @Charlotte, thought about the points we discussed at our 1:1 on Friday.

Use house icon and Home terminology instead of world icon and Explore label in article overflow menu

This sounded like a good idea to me before the weekend. I gave it some more thought this morning and am hesitant to introduce one more notion to the app’s current concept. When we want to introduce new terminology like Home instead of Explore, it needs to be done on an app(s) level. Definitely worth considering renaming Explore to Home on both iOS and Android - but it does not make sense to do it just in one menu. Should we create a separate task for this?

You're right that it doesn't make sense to do it on one menu. My hypothesis is that many of our users don't know what "Explore" would mean in this context, however. (It even took me a minute to figure out that it wasn't an article tool, but rather a link to the feed.) I would suggest creating a ticket to assess whether this hypothesis is actually correct.

Do we need to show the forward button or not?

Showing it only when it’s available, as per the task’s description is IMO the way to go. We’re already making use of the app being some sort of (Wikipedia) browser, as we’re using tabs, search, links, etc. I think Forward definitely has its right to exist.

Happy to talk through during grooming. If there is a concept of "forward" that makes sense in the app we can implement this.

Chatted with @Pginer-WMF today about the work in T259717 and T259795

• Putting the screens together for usertesting.com as a basic prototype could also be helpful to get some opinions
• Search at the same place is something that can be tested
• About new search position (bottom instead of top):
  • PG: Better to observe, rather than asking (in usability tests)
  • RS: Gets feedback from design research on how to phrase questions
  • PG: Another point at reorienting people, let’s imagine there’s no Wikipedia (Desktop / Mobile)
  • PG: Some users need to readapt to the new position of search
  • PG: Consistency across products (top right) vs “new users” (better UX)
  • RS: Suggests to release to Beta after getting opinions first, then release it to production
• Hierarchy of article toolbar
  • PG: On a meta level, what exactly is the role of the toolbar?
  • PG: Article specific vs general actions?
  • PG: Usability testing → ask what are the actions in the toolbar?
  • RS: Not too much distinction between main nav and toolbar
    • PG brings up example of MS word toolbar that is contextual

Thanks for the input!

Chatted with @mwilliams about search on Commons, the suggestions in T259717 and T259795 and his previous work on search at Etsy.

• MW mentions that a handful engineers are working on search at WMF and that they don’t have a dedicated designer.
  • MW: It’ll be good to talk/sync about efforts of designers working on search at the moment.
  • RS: suggests to create a “task force” for search? Where do we want in the future?
• MW: What does success look like for Commons?
  • When he worked at Etsy, it was pretty lear: less search time → more conversion
  • Measuring success on Commons
    • How many searches are made on Commons per week?
      • Compare legacy vs new search
    • Session time and search time: How long are people spending time searching before getting to a result
    • How do people adjust their query?
      • E.g. Dog vs “brown dog”, initial query didn’t lead to result
    • What’s the average number of searches per session
    • Clickthrough rate can be tracked easier on Commons (as opposed to Wikipedia) because there’s a dedicated search page
    • Any other action that is interesting to measure? Not really!
      • What is a successful search flow? It’s tricky to measure saving photos / right click to see if users downloaded an asset
• MW asks what’s meant by “physically hardest to reach”
  • RS: Mentions that positioning it lower in the screen, it’s more accessible
  • MW: At Etsy, they moved the search around quite a bit, from the top, to the main nav and now back to the top (MW’s doesn’t remember the exact reason why it’s moved back up though).
• MW mentions that Designing search at Etsy has been an “try and fail” process. A lot of things were designed and tested. Then eventually rolled back to the initial state at a later point in time.
• MW: Measure search on Explore vs nav item
  • RS: Explore has low usage, might be an unfair comparison

Let me know if I captured it all @mwilliams — and thanks a lot for the input!

Amending the conversation with @SGautam_WMF about search from an emerging markets perspective on Aug 5, 2020:

• RS: That is the Android team’s target audience
• SG: Native hindi writer would write “aam” for mango (“आम”) but there are no results (down south / new emerging markets).
• They’re not using the latin script way of typing.
• Search for “Mango” (northern india: Aam) the top 5 results will point to Mango
  • Hindi
  • English
  • Punjabi
• True Hindi Writer would type “आम”
• SG asks how much we can really do here?
• At Inuka, it was technically not not possible to search entire Wikipedia.
• Can there be any visual feedback for the subtabs
• Talks about about knowing the intention of users:
  • What are they really going to search for?

Let me know if I captured it all @SGautam_WMF — and thanks a lot for the input!

Here’s @SGautam_WMF’s investigation from “a next billion users” perspective:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tfnAQuaGOgqIjrqJYXmleMKNUhn2_w051buBtV53_d8/edit#slide=id.g9195624b56_0_0

I’ll go through his deck and will create a separate task for the relevant points.

Thanks a lot @SGautam_WMF ! 👏

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