User talk:Jaredzimmerman (WMF)

Drafts
I like the image you made, so I updated Draft with it. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   04:55, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 05:03, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * @Steven, nice, we should code it up for real.

User and user talk page
Hi. I redirected User:JZimmerman (WMF) and User talk:JZimmerman (WMF) to User:Jaredzimmerman (WMF) and User talk:Jaredzimmerman (WMF) as it looks like you manually renamed yourself in October. Hope you don't mind. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:09, 29 December 2013 (UTC) Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 06:35, 29 December 2013 (UTC) Thanks MZMcBride! I appreciate it.

Introspection exhibition
I think one day we should find someone to make a gallery of how different people around the world see Wikimedia wikis. "How I see Wikipedia" or "How Wikisource looks to me" or something like that. I uploaded a screenshot at  for myself. I don't miss the globe or most of the sidebar sections. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:15, 29 December 2013 (UTC) Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 06:43, 29 December 2013 (UTC) MZMcBride, do you mean after people do a lot of end user customization? We did a similar thing at Autodesk but since it was based on config files we were able to parse them with code. While screenshots would certainly be interesting to look through, the shear number of images might be too large a task to parse through in a meaningful way (not a reason to avoid doing it) just something to think about when devoting effort to a project like that. We are definitely planning on adding visual diffing to our regression test at some point. So we'll have a server side equivalent but it will be based on the test system and not any "aftermarket" customization users have done or exotic browsers they may be using. Thank you for the interesting idea.
 * People who do a lot of end-user customization ("power users") would be one group, sure. But most views (something like 90%+... I should have a more accurate stat) of our site are anonymous views. So even doing a logged-out screenshot of the English Wikipedia main page (using the default Vector skin) in many browsers would be interesting as a gallery, I think. All different variations could be explored. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:02, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 08:28, 29 December 2013 (UTC) Sounds like that would be the same as (but not as good as) regular automated browser testing, where we can control things like window size. Otherwise diff detection become needle in a haystack as to what is actually changing per system. It would certainly show us things like font issues but we're likely not going to download fonts to users systems unless it's something like opendyslexic or a language font issue the user has explicitly requested. What did you have in mind as far as a question this would help us solve?
 * I actually didn't see any practical value in it at all. I just thought it would be interesting to see such a gallery (or galleries). It could prove to be useful for limited testing, but it would not be an attempt to try to show very combination of changes (Monobook v. Vector, OpenDyslexic v. sans-serif, administrator v. regular user). I hadn't thought about OpenDyslexic, but that's exactly the kind of tweak/modification that I think would be interesting to see in a gallery of how people (readers, editors, power users, etc.) view Wikimedia wikis. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 08:55, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
 * MZ, to start with you could use http://www.webpagetest.org/ for some kinds of pages, setting "dial up" speed, and see what comes out of it. If you click "video" it also gives you a gallery of screenshots. --Nemo 08:59, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 29 December 2013 (UTC) Like I said it could be very interesting, not the best way to gather large scale data but interesting none the less. When we do research like that we always start with a hypothesis to test or at least a question we're trying to answer that would be action all once we'd learned what we needed to from the test. Also taking and sending screenshots is pretty far beyond many readers skill level. So you'd already be self selecting a group of users that might not be reflective of "everyone" there are JavaScript libraries that you can use to allow the user to capture the screen from within the browser, many sites use this as part of help & support flows in order to better see what the user is seeing when they have technical issues. Turning something like that into an extension could be a way of increasing the number of people who could participate. In general though I wonder how many readers you would actually get to send you screenshots of their screen without a clear rational behind why. And even with a reason I don't know how many would spend the time it takes to participate. Figuring a way to lower the technical barrier down to a button click would be a good first step though.