User talk:ARipstra (WMF)

Nemo 19:45, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

SurveyMonkey
(Seen at subpage.) Cf. . Have you already joined wiki-research-l? See also some links to a one place where you can find most of the "research"/analytics/statistics questions worked on by the community. If you need more pointers to the kind of things that compose the bulk of editors' experience and research, let me/us know. :) --Nemo 07:30, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

HI Nemo! Thanks for your note :) I am on the Design team and work closely with the Research team. I work with all the teams, to various degrees depending on what kind of qualitative design research they need. I am a design researcher - focusing on user research and strategic design research. So, I do a lot of usability testing, collaboration with design and product, as well as collaborating with the research team. When the quantitative researchers have questions about why things are happening or not, I can help them answer the question. THey will help me find a representative sample of a certain cohort of users and I will design a research methodology to better understand the motivations, goals, experiences, etc. of that group. THis will provide some hypotheses about the Why question that we then can do more quantitative experiments with. Right now I am trying to build the Design / Research page. It is different than the whole research team, and would like to organized my findings differently as they are related to specific design projects. I thought I made a sandbox page to play in and prototype and learn - as a way to build this page out so it is more usable and useful.. can't find it at the moment. Am not remembering what I called it. I looked in my list of contributions - still no sight of it. Might have made it on another wiki :|

--ARipstra (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Casual usability observations
Hello, I was wondering... I often conduct hands-on editing workshops and sessions for Wikimedia Italia and many others do all over the world. When doing so, I notice and mentally note down many non-obvious obstacles the users encounter (often frustrating me more than themselves), but I have no systematic way to share them other than file enhancement requests and bugs. Would it be worthwhile to set up a page where editing trainers from all over the world would be invited to post their (unplanned) (in)usability tests? --Nemo 14:52, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your note. The kind of observational data you are describing is really valuable for understanding details of the buriers people encounter when attempting to edit / contribute, and also what works well for people. Observational data is much more valuable and right to the point than self reported data which comes through surveys, etc. Using both methods, along with usage data analytics on a larger scale is powerful information, and part of what guides product teams how to reduce or (hopefully) eliminate those buriers. Since the design research department at the Foundation is getting up and running now, we have plans to do some structured research about editing. (This contextual inquiry article needs a little updating, which is on my list to do, but does a pretty good job of describing the methodology in general terms.) So, along with this kind of research, I think it would be valuable to also gather the observations you and others collect during editing workshops and sessions. Would it be possible for you and I to meet and discuss a method to gather those observations in a structured and quantifiable way? I have done this kind of work many times, and have suggestions about what might work best for structured data collection. I am, of course, open to collaborate with you on what kind of data collection would work best for you (and others) in the field. Thanks for reaching out Nemo!! --ARipstra (WMF) (talk) 08:37, 8 October 2014 (UTC)ARipstra (WMF)


 * Workshops and training of all sorts happens independently everywhere in the world, so it's not really possible to "represent" everyone and make a specific proposal. The data collection could start on a simple wiki page and evolve from there, but it probably needs two features: 1) simple, 2) tidy and alive.
 * 1) Simple means that I can record something I observed in 5 minutes or less, possibly during an event, or shortly after it: this won't be the main objective of the even, just an accessory. 2) Tidy means that someone feels responsible for archiving stuff acted upon etc., alive that one feels the contribution will actually go somewhere and be useful.
 * Now just typing without too much thought: for instance, this could be a page (or even a phabricator project) where I can enter a simple "story" as in the first paragraph of the bug I linked above; then someone would be there to comment and, if the issue seems relevant enough, add the thing to a list of issues to verify more scientifically. To kickstart the project, you could say that in N months from now you'll make a usability session with a dozen users (or whatever thing is "scientifically suitable") in order to verify some usability suspicions, and that in N-1 months from now you'll need to have a list of hypotheses to verify, so you ask everyone to submit their observations, among which they'll be chosen. --Nemo 11:29, 8 October 2014 (UTC)