Extension:FINCH

Wikimedia Product and Design cannot currently make informed decisions about some aspects of our users experience of our sites, such as access device, platform, and screen size. Critical information about connection speed, geolocation and technology availability are not available or not easily accessible to decision makers in the Product group.

This effort will be contributed to by both the Analytics team and the UX Research team. This information will contribute fuel for the product and design teams to better understand what we need to build or improve and why, as well as a method of measuring the success or shortcomings of what we build.

FINCH ("Factors influencing change") reports will allow Product teams to make informed decisions about users experience of the products as mediated by technology. Inform plans for graceful degradation, and limitations imposed by users hardware and software systems, devices, and connectivity.

Tech Metrics

 * Summary: Attributes of site users, and their objective use of the site, measured though instrumentation consistently applied irrespective of access method.


 * Browser dimensions
 * Screen size
 * Browser/Platform
 * JS/RLI/NO-JS
 * Session length/duration
 * Device
 * Latency and load time
 * Connection speed

Tech Metrics Rationale

 * Screen size - we need to know the 90% of users so that we can make intelligent decision about screen layouts usable real estate to work with.
 * Browser dimensions - how much of a user’s screen are they devoting to our site? How are they using their screen layout, does it differ during an edit session vs reading?
 * Browser & Platform - We cannot support all versions of all browsers, but we can support the most common, and have reasonable fallbacks for recent historic versions, having this data will help us know what makes sense to support and where we can begin to deprecate legacy code.
 * Device - How are users accessing our site, what are the limitation or abilities of their devices, do we have a high rate of access to functions that don’t support touch events from touchscreen devices?
 * JS / RLI /NO-JS  - Do we need to spend more time or less time designing and building for noJS and Resource loader impaired  situations?
 * Session time - What kind of time commitment are people making to the site, how does it differ per platform, device or region, should we optimize for a 30 second experience, 5 minute session, on an hour long open ended research and browsing wikilost experience? When compared to time on task are individual users coming to the site to do one thing or multiple tasks pers session?
 * Time on task - Specifically used to measure from a known start and end point for a task funnel, are we not only making experience more enjoyable, but take users less time to complete.
 * Connection speed, latency and load time - Do we need to spend more of our time on optimization work? should we make bandwidth saving technologies from zero and mobile available to desktop users? or can we use more bandwidth, have larger images, prefetch content and use webfonts. Do we need to explore local storage options and offline drafts to align with how our users are experiencing the site?

Status
FINCH extension — todo

Browser & Screen Dimensions — needs integration (currently in Multimedia Viewer codebase)

JS/RLI/NO-JS — needs integration (currently in Wikipedia Zero codebase)

Browser/Platform — todo

Device Type/Class — todo

Session length/duration — todo

Connection Speed — todo