Talk pages project/Usability/Analysis

This page outlines the Editing Team's proposal for how we – volunteers and staff – will assess the impact that changes to how desktop talk pages appear have on volunteers across experiences levels.

Motivation
For wikitext talk pages to be valuable, Junior Contributors need to intuitively recognize them as places to communicate with other volunteers, and Senior Contributors need to be able to spend minimal effort understanding the conversations happening on a given page.

The trouble is, volunteers across experience levels report that the current presentation of wikitext talk pages can make recognizing talk pages, understanding the conversations happening within them, and identifying what they need to click/tap to participate in these conversations unnecessarily difficult.

Specifically, user feedback,      usability tests,  the Talk Page Consultation (see: #Newcomers, #Confusion, and #Design), and academic research have highlighted the difficulties people have reading and using talk pages.

By making the components that comprise talk page conversations (e.g., conversation topics, conversation boundaries, comments, etc.) and the tools necessary for participating in them easier for people to parse, we are striving to make it easier for volunteers, across experience levels, to communicate on-wiki.

More information about the research that motivated this work can be found on the project page.