Page Previews

The Hovercards beta feature provides the casual reader with a streamlined browsing experience. Whenever a reader hovers over a link to another article, a short summary of the article and a relevant image is provided to them so they can make the decision about whether they want to read the full article.

Intended users
Our primary users are the casual drive-by reader who browses around Wikipedia without any particular goal, simply enjoying reading the articles.

Hovercards will be of use to any user of Wikipedia who browses around the site frequently.

Product objective
Our product will make it easier to get an overview of an article before you decide whether or not to browse to it. Consequently, the smoothness of the user experience for these users will be increased.

Key changes
Restyling it to enable easy reading. Currently the type size is small and the margins are tight.
 * Create a consistent visual style with the article type treatment.
 * Emphasize the lead images, so a user gets an idea of a term using both text and image.
 * The action set in the gadget feels out of context, hence we need to validate which of those actions are useful for readers and editors.
 * Include the last edited timestamp that we have tested on wikipedia mobile web, but de-emphasize it.

Priorities

 * Article titles
 * Wiktionary
 * User names

Open questions

 * Should there be any actions in the popups?
 * If so, what?
 * Ideal timings for show and hide?
 * How precise do we need to be about these timings?
 * What if any animation/effects are used during transitions?
 * How does this integrate (or not) with the existing navigation popups and reference tooltips?

Analytics and instrumentation

 * Number of displays of the popup
 * Links followed while popup is displayed vs after popup dismissal
 * Links followed within popups

Code
The code lives in a git repo here and on gerrit too. Patches merged in February 2014 include:
 * Add time ago in words at the bottom of the popup
 * Add `redirects to` message at the top of the popup
 * Add hook for BetaFeatures

See the Popups "dashboard" in Gerrit for patches in development.

Bugs: list open, list all

Specifications
A more detailed Spec can be found here.