Reading/Multimedia/Media Viewer/Improvements

Screenshot of the Media Viewer's new 'minimal design'

Here is our plan for improvements to Media Viewer, a new feature that aims to provide a better viewing experience on Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites.

Our goals for these improvements are to make Media Viewer easier to use by readers and casual editors, our primary target users for this tool.

To that end, we created a new 'minimal design' including these features:
 * a more prominent button linking to the File: page
 * an easier way to enlarge images
 * image captions right below the image
 * clearer icons for download and share
 * no metadata panel below the fold

These improvements are based on usability testing and community suggestions collected in recent weeks. Based on this feedback, the multimedia team has been prototyping and testing new designs, to be incrementally developed in September and October 2014, after they are validated by user research.

Goals

 * Our primary target users for Media Viewer are readers and casual editors.
 * For these users, we aim to make Media Viewer easier to use and more informative.
 * For power users, we aim to make it easy to disable Media Viewer if they don't want it.
 * For all users, we want to address any critical performance or licensing issues.

As part of this new release, we also aim to clarify the relationship between Media Viewer and the File: description page:
 * Media Viewer offers a quick preview for browsing images, right where you are.
 * The File Page remains the place where you can get (or edit) all the details and file metadata.

For more information, view these slides.

User Benefits
We are developing a new 'minimal design' to deliver key benefits more effectively to our target users: readers and casual editors.

Here are the benefits we aim to offer to these casual users, based on feedback we collected through surveys and talk pages. Features or improvements that can support those benefits are shown in parenthesis. We have prototyped these improvements and are now testing them with target users.

Primary benefits

 * preview larger images (click on thumbnails to view them in Media Viewer)
 * learn about the image (read full caption and/or full description)
 * get more details (go to file page)
 * browse related images (next/previous)
 * enlarge image (see original file)
 * disable Media Viewer (cog icon to opt out)

Secondary benefits

 * share this image (copy the file link)
 * download this file (select size you want)
 * find out who created this file (author, source, license)
 * go back to article page (close Media Viewer)
 * re-enable Media Viewer (cog icon on file page)

Prototype
We have created a rough prototype of our new 'minimal design', to deliver the above benefits more effectively to our target users. That new design is shown at the top of this page -- and can also be viewed here.

Here is where you can test the new Media Viewer prototype on our 'slow' alpha site:

Demos:
 * Lightbox demo
 * London
 * Berlin

User Test pages:
 * Rapa Nui National Park (test article 1)
 * New York City (test article 2)

(please don't edit either page, as they are being used for our ongoing user research)

Development Tasks
Here are development tasks we're considering for Media Viewer in September, based on what we have learned from our ongoing user research and community consultation.

"Must have"
These improvements are considered critical for this release:
 * A more prominent link to the File: page - See suggestions by Gryllida, Nyttend, Deskana, Jee, 92.229.95.23.
 * "More Details" should include project icon - See suggestion by Patrick87, Andy king50, Goldzahn.
 * A caption or description right below the image - See suggestion by 164.40.202.144.
 * Enlarge images by clicking on them - See suggestions by Nyttend, Luha, Anika, SlimVirgin.
 * An easier way for any user to individually disable the tool for their personal use] - See suggestion by Orderinchaos.
 * Re-enable Media Viewer from a File Page - See suggestion by Andy king50, Ultra7.
 * Rename File page button to better label than "Expand view" - See suggestion by Sminthopsis84.
 * Make MediaViewer text larger in Monobook - See suggestion by Deskana.
 * Pre-render thumbnails on backend for new uploads - See suggestions by Chewbacca2205, Holger1959, Rich Farmbrough, 84.172.144.1.
 * Support metadata cleanup drive.

"Should have"
These important improvements will be considered, if time allows -- but may need to be pushed to future releases:
 * Fix 'Licensed under Fair Use' credits - See suggestion
 * Attribution prompt improvement - See suggestion by Holger1959 and Gnangarra.
 * Show file page link if attribution is missing - See suggestion by Rich Farmbrough.
 * Additional attribution/licensing improvements consistent with metadata cleanup effort.

"Could have"
These improvements are 'nice to have', but are not deemed critical for this release -- they will be considered for future releases:
 * Adjust the ‘Go back’ function for Media Viewer - See suggestions by Freddie331, Rich Farmbrough.
 * Faster access to file names - See suggestions byKuboF and Nyttend.
 * Additional performance improvements for users on slow connections - needs more investigation.

Related pages

 * m:Community Engagement (Product)/Media Viewer consultation, project summary and update, with current discussion on its talk page
 * Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer, project rationale