Next steps

• @dchen to meet with @VirginiaPoundstone to receive the additional information she needs to write a draft Research Brief and propose a scoping and timelines.
• Leila and Debra to review the scoping and timelines, work with Daisy and Virginia for adjustments as needed.
• Daisy to start working on the project.

• Context. Provide a short paragraph with some background context for your request, please include links to relevant material.

The Experiment Platform team is developing a platform that product teams will use for running controlled experiments across Wikimedia properties. This system is composed of several backend components and a front end user experience know as Experimentation Lab (xLab for short, formerly known as Metrics Platform). In FY23/24, we conducted qualitative research with 15 Product+Tech staff, revealing significant challenges with experimentation: 10+ week setup times, low data trust, and high costs for minimal ROI. We've made progress by working closely with product teams to reduce the time to conduct experiments on logged in users and are currently working on enabling anonymous user A/B testing (FY25-SDS 2.4). As we onboard a new PM for the platform (start data April 7th) and prepare for wider adoption in FY26, we need to validate our direction and gather deeper insights into user needs across different team maturity levels.

Relevant documents: Qualitative User Research Summary, Experimentation Lab Product Spec, SDS 2.1 & SDS 2.4 documents as well as the planning for next fiscal year.

• Description.What is your request about?

We're seeking design research support to validate/contextualize/reject our initial findings, gather feedback on current and upcoming releases, identify adoption barriers for teams with varying experimentation maturity (First-timer, Occasional, Advanced, and Power teams), explore workflow needs for both logged-in and anonymous user testing, and understand expectations for self-service analytics.

• Expected Deliverable.
  • A report which includes the learnings from the study as well as potential hypotheses that the PM can prioritize in the coming quarters.

• Other. Do you have any other questions or comments ?
  • We're particularly interested in understanding how to bridge the gap between "experiment curious" teams and those who regularly conduct experiments
  • Previous research focused on current state; this round should focus more on validating our solution approach and identifying adoption needs

• Stakeholder who will sign-off on scope and timelines: @VirginiaPoundstone (Virginia will coordinate with the new PM who is joining us soon as she sees fit)
• Sign off on scope, timelines and deliverables on Design Research end: @leila and Debra
• First complete draft of Research Brief: Daisy.