Wikimedia Research/Design Research

What We Do
Design Research collaborates with Design, Analytics, Engineering, Product and the Wikipedia Community in order to help define what, at a high level teams should build and why (Generative Research). Also, Design Research supports iteration of concepts and functionality toward a usable and intuitive experience for users (Evaluative Research). Design Research, including both generative and evaluative research rely on a toolkit of research methodologies to provide findings informing decision making, concept development and concept iteration. Though the design team has been performing evaluative research to support iteration, design research is a new department at Wikimedia Foundation, and is growing and evolving to support the movement, the community and the foundation.

Participate in Research!
If you would like to participate in future research, please opt in by completing this survey. From this survey we will understand what kind of research would be best to invite you to participate in. Also, if you have opted in to be a research participant and would like to opt back out, please send us an email at optoutresearch@wikimedia.org asking us to remove your information from our database of opted in participants.

Core Features

 * ''' Echo
 * ''' Flow
 * Flow Moderated Testing, November, 2014: talk pages and Flow

Editing

 * Editing in General
 * Editing Tasks Survey
 * Editing Tasks Card Sort
 * Visual Editor: desktop and laptop
 * The wikitext editor
 * Mobile Editing
 * Apps
 * Guerrilla Testing iOS ipad Visual Editor
 * Heuristic Evaluation for Visual Editor (iOS)
 * Guerrilla Testing for iOS App
 * Mobile Web
 * Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Web Visual Editor (Android)
 * Guerrilla Testing iOS ipad Visual Editor

Growth

 * Acquisition of new users:
 * Onboarding new Wikipedians
 * Guided tours
 * Task suggestions
 * '''Account Creation:
 * Account creation user experience/User testing


 * Draft_namespace/Usability_testing

Mobile

 * ''' Apps
 * Guerrilla Testing On-boarding Page and some discovery about readers and their thoughts on editing
 * Guerrilla Testing Table of Contents discovery
 * Guerrilla Testing iOS App
 * Guerrilla Testing Reading Behavior (App Layouts) October 3, 2014


 * ''' Mobile Web
 * Guerrilla Testing Wikigrok Version A
 * Guerrilla Testing, November 2014: Wikigrok Version B

Multimedia

 * Media Viewer
 * Media Viewer Iteration Usability (August, 2014)
 * Media Viewer Enable / Disable Flow Usability testing (September 2014)
 * Media Viewer Validation, Moderated Testing (November, 2014)

User Experience / Beta Features

 * Winter
 * Winter / Fixed Header
 * Other User Tests

Other Design Research Projects

 * REFLEX

Project Queuing

 * |Trello Planning Board

Archives of Broader Wikimedia Research Team
Wikimedia Research Portal

Methodologies for Design Research
Heuristic Evaluation / Cognitive Walkthrough

Guerrilla Research / Cafe Research

Unmoderated remote usability testing

Moderated remote usability testing

Contextual Inquiry

Design Ethnography

Unmoderated and moderated task benchmarking

Tools for Design Research
Google Hang Outs OnAir - "Usability lab" for moderated, remote generative and evaluative research.

Usertesting.com — Unmoderated remote scripted usability testing (only 15 minutes per session)

Optimal Sort - Unmoderated card sorting tool

SurveyMonkey.com — Surveys with some analysis tools and simple logic.

Qualtrics - Surveys with more analysis tools and more complex logic capabilities.