WMDE Engineering/UserExperience

Statement of Purpose
"'We foster a shared understanding of users and their needs based on research to turn ideas into useful & usable products that enable people to share and access knowledge.' - WMDE UX & Design Team Purpose created end of 2019"

If you want to support us in reaching this mission and participate in user experience activities, please sign up for our mailing list. For more information, see the Participate in UX Activities page. More information on what UX is, see it’s Wikipedia article: User Experience / UX.

User Research
We do user research to better understand the motivations, activities and problems of Wikipedia and Wikidata users.

Even with a good understanding of Mediawiki editing, we can’t know all the different ways people edit, nor could we account for experiences of very new or very experienced users. Research helps us to get a good understanding of these diverse experiences.

While it is great if a researcher (or any other person) knows what users do, it can’t supplement for a common understanding shared by the whole team. Thus, the research results are always summarized and communicated to the entire team. Usually, they are also uploaded on Wikimedia Commons to be publicly shared with the community.

User research also helps to understand and mitigate risks. Any change has risks since a software improvement for one person could also make it worse for another. Doing research with diverse people helps us to understand different viewpoints and to find mutually beneficial solutions.

How to Participate in User Research
In order to get these different perspectives from a diverse group of users we need your support! Please check Participate in UX Activities to learn more how you can support our goal of improving the usefulness and usability of Wikimedia projects.

Interface Design
TODO: Overview from low-fi prototyping to high-fi designs illustrated with example screenshots and links.

Usability Testing
TODO: Explanation what a Usability Test is and why we do it. Information on how to participate.

Current Activities
TODO: Overview of current activities with call to action to participate
 * Technical Wishes: Templates
 * Technical Wishes: Geoinformation
 * Wikibase: Merge function
 * Wikibase: Federated Properties
 * Wikidata: Third Party Databases
 * Wikidata:

Past Activities
TODO: Overview of past activities with links to research reports and developed features

Contact Us
If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for this page, please contact us: [mailto:ux@wikimedia.de ux@wikimedia.de]

Related Pages

 * Wikidata:Usability and usefulness
 * Wikipedia:Technische Wünsche/Topwünsche (in German)
 * Wikimedia Foundation Design
 * Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Improve User Experience