Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements

Our desktop interface has been changing over time, yet since the introduction of the Vector skin, most of these changes have been led by volunteers and consolidated into prototypes, user scripts, gadgets, and volunteer-led skins. We think it's time to take some of these ideas and bring them to the default experience. Over the next couple of years, the readers web team will be researching and building out improvements to the desktop experience based on research and existing tools. Our goals are to make Wikipedia more welcoming to new readers and editors, and easier and quicker to use for all (both newcomers and veteran editors).

This project is in the very early stages of discussions. There is no concrete plan or development yet. We need your collaboration and feedback on the general focus areas of the problem, as well as some thoughts on the initial design ideas below.

How you can help
Research and ideas: Please edit and add to the "Previous/current work in this area" sections below, to add new ideas, notes, links to past discussions, links to existing gadgets/scripts, links to good external design-patterns to consider, etc.

Individual testing: Once development begins, we will make the ongoing work available directly via a new skin option in Preferences. You will be able to individually opt-in and test the changes.

Whole wikis: We are also looking for any wikis that are interested in helping with widespread testing, such as changing the local default for logged-out site users. If you think your community might be interested, please ask us if you have any questions, then start a local discussion, and once there is local consensus add a link to that discussion on the talk page.

Longer comments and thoughts are welcome on the talkpage in any language.

Constraints

Here is a list of things we would explicitly like to keep in mind:


 * Not touching the content - no work will be done in terms of styling templates or to the structure of pages themselves
 * Not removing any functionality - things might move around, but all navigational items and other functionality currently available by default will remain
 * No drastic changes to the layout - we're taking an evolutionary approach to the changes and want the site to continue feeling familiar

August 2019: Wikimania Brainstorming Session
We held a brainstorming session at Wikimania 2019, during which we presented basic ideas of the project, and brainstormed feature ideas and technical considerations. You can see the slideshow presentation on the side, which includes our general ideas so far, as well as some mockups we created to help us brainstorm. We will soon be publishing the summary of the feedback, as well as interview session results.

August 2019: Technical Research
To explore different technical possibilities for the project, the team spent a week hacking on different approaches to a single problem - allowing the sidebar in the desktop experience to be collapsible. We are hoping to use the learnings from these experiments to determine the architecture for the improvements, as well as the skin we would like to build these improvements within. Here is a list of the experiments themselves:


 * Building a collapsible sidebar using a fork of the vector skin
 * Building the desktop sidebar within the Minerva skin. An exploration in the question: "is there a world where we have the same skin for desktop and mobile?"
 * Building a collapsible sidebar using user styles only

Problem statements

 * 1) Wikimedia wikis do not feel welcoming
 * Wikimedia wikis’s desktop sites are not a welcoming or familiar experience for new readers. It does not match the expectations created by the modern web and our other platforms (the Android and iOS apps as well as the mobile website).  It feels disorienting and disconnected due to the haphazardly organized navigation and interface links. In turn, this causes readers and editors to have less trust in Wikimedia wikis, to be less likely to explore Wikimedia wikis, and eventually, to use our sites less than they otherwise would (i.e. a decrease in retention).
 * 1) Wikimedia wikis are not easy to use
 * Readers (new readers especially) are unable to intuitively perform basic functions like switching languages, searching for content, or adjusting reading settings. Additionally there is a lot of clutter that distracts from the content they are interested in. New editors are faced with a similar barrier; an interface that is not welcoming or intuitive and is cluttered.  It is difficult for them to perform basic tasks necessary for contribution, such as setting up an account, opening the editor, or learning how to use special pages for moderation purposes (e.g. history pages to find&revert vandalism). By keeping the status quo, we are preventing people who are eager to contribute from being able to do so (i.e. experience bias).
 * 1) Wikimedia wikis’s model is not easy to understand
 * Currently, a very small percentage of readers understand how Wikimedia wikis function. Our interfaces do not highlight the inner workings of the site in an intuitive way. Many readers are not aware that the content they are reading is written by volunteers and updated frequently, or that they can potentially contribute as well.

In addition, the large difference in experiences among our various products (desktop, apps, and the mobile web), makes it difficult for readers to know the connections between our products and to associate them with the content itself. This creates a lack of unity in the concept of Wikimedia sites.

Summary by audience:

Goals
Here are the outcomes we're working towards:


 * Focus on the content
 * Provide easier access to everyday actions (e.g. search, language switching, editing)
 * Put things in logical and useful places
 * Increase consistency in the interface with other platforms - mobile web and the apps
 * Eliminate clutter
 * Plan for future growth

Constraints
Here is a list of things we would explicitly like to keep in mind:


 * Not touching the content - no work will be done in terms of styling templates or to the structure of page contents themselves
 * Not removing any functionality - things might move around, but all navigational items and other functionality currently available by default will remain
 * No drastic changes to the layout - we're taking an evolutionary approach to the changes and want the site to continue feeling familiar to readers and editors

Timeline
Here is the roughly planned timeline, which will change based on progress:


 * Phase 1: May – September 2019: Investigation and research, figuring out where we can create value, finding focus
 * Phase 2: July – November 2019: Developing focus areas, sketching and prototyping ideas, starting conversations
 * Phase 3: October – January 2019: Continued user testing and design refinements
 * Phase 4+: To be determined

Research and design process
General note: our process is not particularly strict. It is based loosely on research and design process best practices, however it is also relatively emergent and flexible, in that we are engaging in ad hoc activities and explorations as they feel appropriate. While we've outlined the research and design process in three phases below, in practice the phases overlap. Additionally, for the time being there doesn't seem to be a clear way of separating research activities from design activities (they are interrelated) so we're discussing them together.

Phase 1. Investigation and research, figuring out where we can create value, finding focus (May 2019 – September 2019)

 * Main page: mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Research and design: Phase 1

We began by considering the current default experience on desktop (Vector) and asking ourselves: in what ways can we improve upon this? Where are opportunities to modify the interface in order to create a better experience for all readers and editors? How can we make it easier for people to do the things they want to do? How can we create a more pleasing reading environment? Of course while exploring these questions we kept in mind the project's constraints. The research and design activities we engaged in in order to explore these questions included:


 * Understanding the history of the desktop interface
 * Reading previous Wikipedia research conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation or other research institutions and individuals
 * Discussions at our team offsite to develop a shared understanding of the project and generate ideas
 * Reading about redesigns/updates of other large websites (Reddit, Twitter, etc.)
 * Conducting an audit of other large websites to try and glean common structural elements

The output from phase 1 was: a better understanding of the desktop interface, and proposed focus areas for improvements. We didn't have strict criteria for what a focus area could be. Generally speaking it was an idea of an improvement we could make, though at varying levels of specificity, such as: a less cluttered reading experience, or language switching ease. The proposed focus areas are:


 * Creating a more focused and "quiet" reading environment by consolidating or optionally collapsing navigational links, including:
 * Main sidebar navigation
 * Article tools
 * User tools
 * Language switching
 * Search
 * Article navigation / table of contents

Additional, more feature-specific, ideas that came up: reading preferences (e.g. dark mode), share button, larger edit button / add new article button (for smaller wikis) / making it more obvious how to "get involved", article stats / activity summary.

Phase 2. Developing focus areas, sketching and prototyping ideas, starting conversations (July 2019 – November 2019)
Main page: mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Research and design: Phase 2

The research activities and conversations in phase 1 helped us develop a better understanding of the landscape we were working within (i.e. the desktop interface). It also helped us develop potential focus areas to further investigate (while still remaining open to new ideas). Our next goal was to dig a bit deeper into the focus areas through sketching, prototype, and most importantly conversations with the community. The research and design activities included:


 * Understanding past work, research, and experiments in respective focus areas
 * Obtaining general usage data about the respective focus areas
 * Sketching out and prototyping early ideas to help facilitate conversations
 * Forming early hypotheses
 * User interviews and other feedback at Wikimania
 * Community feedback via MediaWiki (happening soon)
 * User interviews with newcomers and casual readers (happening soon)

The output from phase 2 will include: reactions to sketches of specific interface improvements within the focus areas, a refined (i.e. more opinionated and informed) sense of which improvements are worth pursuing, a proposal for the sequence in which we could implement proposed improvements.

Phase 3. Continued user testing and design refinements (October 2019 – January 2019)
Phase 3 will be a cycle of: further testing the specific ideas that came out of phase 2, then refining our designs in response to what we learn. There are potentially some things that need to be tested as betas on actual wikis. We will be working to identify these things and figure out how we plan to test them in beta (i.e. what data we would be tracking, and what decisions we'd be making based on what behavior we see).

The output of phase 3 will include: nearly finalized designs (though we usually leave room for additional iterations during implementation) and a plan for what we want to learn as we roll things out in beta, and what decisions/changes we would make based on that information.

Design ideas
A few of the many ideas that have been suggested so far:


 * Focusing on the content, distinguish content from user-interface
 * Potential features:
 * collapsible sections in sidebar
 * Past examples: Hebrew Wikipedia, ...
 * collapsible sidebar
 * Past examples: Wide Skin (enwiki script), Hide Vector sidebar (enwiki script), ...
 * Easier access to everyday actions
 * Potential features:
 * sticky header with search, table of contents, edit links
 * Past examples: Usability-wiki (historical research), Winter (historical prototype), Timeless (alternative skin), ...
 * more prominent language switching (moving the language switcher to the top of the page)
 * Past examples: Timeless skin at 1325px or wider and at 1085px or thinner, ...
 * Putting things in logical and useful places
 * Potential features:
 * Consolidated user menu (e.g. collapsing things like "Log out", "Preferences", and "Beta", inside a dropdown menu)
 * Preferences for logged out users
 * Past examples: Accessibility settings/preferences (T91201), ...
 * Moving article actions from the sidebar to within the article
 * Past examples: Winter, Timeless at 1085px or thinner, ...

Previous work on improved sidebar navigation: Collapsible sidebar and other sidebar work

 * Usability initiative research on collapsible languages links
 * Timeless skin sidebar
 * Usability initiative mockups on collapsible sections within the sidebar

Other previous work on improved navigation

 * Compact personal bar
 * Sticky sections gadget on enwiki
 * Sticky header user script
 * An older sticky header user script
 * Another (now broken) sticky header user script