Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/de

Unsere Desktop-Oberfläche hat sich im Laufe der Zeit verändert, aber seit der Einführung des Vector-Skins (dem Standard-Design der Wikimedia-Projekte) wurden die meisten dieser Änderungen von Freiwilligen durchgeführt und sind nur in Prototypen, Benutzerskripten, Helferlein und von Freiwilligen betreute Benutzeroberflächen verfügbar.

Dieses Projekt befindet sich in einem sehr frühen Diskussionsstadium. Es gibt noch keinen konkreten Plan oder irgendeine Entwicklung. Wir benötigen Eure Mitarbeit und Euer Feedback zu den allgemeinen Schwerpunkten des Problems sowie Eure Gedanken zu den ersten Entwürfen unten.

Wie du helfen kannst
Recherche und Ideen: Bitte editiere die Abschnitte von Phase 1: Design-Ideen unten, um neue Ideen, Notizen, Links zu früheren Diskussionen, Links zu bestehenden Helferlein/Skripten, Links zu guten externen Designmustern, die berücksichtigt werden sollten, usw. hinzuzufügen.

Individuelles Testen: Sobald die Entwicklung beginnt, werden wir die laufenden Arbeiten direkt über eine neue Skin-Option in den Einstellungen zur Verfügung stellen. Es wird möglich sein, per Opt-in die Änderungen individuell zu testen.

Gesamte Wikis: Wir sind auch auf der Suche nach Wikis, die daran interessiert sind, bei umfangreichen Tests zu helfen, wie z.B. die Änderung des lokalen Standards für nicht angemeldete Benutzer der Website. Wenn du denkst, dass deine Community interessiert sein könnte, frag uns bitte, wenn du irgendwelche Fragen hast, dann starte eine lokale Diskussion, und sobald es einen lokalen Konsens gibt, füge einen Link zu dieser Diskussion auf der Diskussionsseite hinzu.

Längere Kommentare und Anregungen sind auf der Diskussionsseite willkommen (in jeder Sprache).

Updates
Subscribe to Newsletter:Desktop Improvements updates to be notified when new sub-sections are added here. Major milestone announcements will go to all wikis via MassMessage.

September 2019: Wikimania research report


During Wikimania 2019, we interviewed editors with the goal of sharing the plans for our upcoming Desktop improvements project, and collecting valuable feedback on a number of preliminary design ideas. Our research consisted of user interviews, a free-form feedback exercise, and a presentation with breakout groups for more focused discussion. We have published a report and a PDF summary (in English) of the feedback we received. Overall, we received positive feedback on the focus areas selected, as well as the individual prototypes for ideas. However, we were also able to identify areas for improvements.

We will be iterating over this feedback over the next few weeks and plan on developing a prototype that we can test with a wider audience across wikis.

In the slideshow below is a sample of 19 of the ideas we tested. For more context, please read the full report and then give us feedback on the talk page!

September 2019: Desktop usage and behavior data analysis
As a part of our research process, we wanted to learn more about the way people currently use the site. In particular, how often they use available functionality such as links in the sidebar, language switching, and search. We have published our results. Overall, usage of sidebar links is low - only about 0.5% of all logged out users and 1.6% of all logged-in desktop users clicked on one of the pages linked in the sidebar. Language switching usage varied, generally based on the size of the wiki, with smaller wikis switching languages more often.

August 2019: Research and brainstorming at Wikimania


Wikimania provided us with the opportunity to speak with experienced members of our communities. Over the five days of the conference we were able to share the plans for the project, and collect valuable feedback on a number of design ideas. Our research consisted of user interviews, a free-form feedback exercise, and a presentation + brainstorming session (you can see the slide-deck we used at the side). 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 - how to enable the sidebar in the desktop experience to be collapsible. We are hoping to use the results from these experiments to determine the technical 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

Problembeschreibungen

 * 1) Wikimedia-Wikis wirken nicht einladend
 * Die Desktop-Seiten von Wikimedia-Wikis sind für neue Leser keine einladende oder vertraute Erfahrung. Es entspricht nicht den Erwartungen, die das moderne Web und unsere anderen Plattformen (die Android- und iOS-Applikationen sowie die mobile Website) an uns stellen. Durch die willkürlich organisierte Navigation und Schnittstellenanbindungen fühlen sie sich verwirrend und unzusammenhängend an.  Dies wiederum führt dazu, dass Leser und Autoren weniger Vertrauen in Wikimedia-Wikis haben, weniger wahrscheinlich Wikimedia-Wikis erkunden und schließlich unsere Seiten weniger nutzen, als sie es sonst tun würden (d.h. eine Verringerung der Bindung).
 * 1) Wikimedia-Wikis sind nicht leicht zu benutzen
 * Leser (insbesondere neue Leser) können grundlegende Funktionen wie das Umschalten von Sprachen, das Suchen von Inhalten oder das Anpassen von Leseeinstellungen nicht intuitiv ausführen. Zusätzlich gibt es eine Menge Unordnung, die von den Inhalten ablenkt, an denen sie interessiert sind. Neue Autoren stehen vor einer ähnlichen Barriere: einer Oberfläche, die nicht einladend oder intuitiv ist und überladen ist. Es ist schwierig für sie, grundlegende Aufgaben zu erfüllen, die für die Mitwirkung notwendig sind, wie z.B. die Einrichtung eines Kontos, das Öffnen des Editors oder das Erlernen der Verwendung von Spezialseiten für Moderationszwecke (z.B. Seiten für die Versionshistorie zum Auffinden und Zurücksetzen von Vandalismus). Alle Benutzer können Probleme damit bekommen, dass die Seiten nicht richtig „responsiv“ sind, was zu Problemen wie sehr breiten Inhalten oder sehr schmalen Inhalten führt (je nach Bildschirm- und Fenstergröße). Indem wir den Status quo beibehalten, verhindern wir, dass Menschen, die einen Beitrag leisten wollen, dies tun können (d.h. eine Erlebensverzerrung).
 * 1) Das Modell der Wikimedia-Wikis ist nicht leicht zu verstehen
 * Derzeit versteht nur ein sehr kleiner Prozentsatz der Leser, wie Wikimedia-Wikis funktionieren. Unsere Oberflächen heben das Innenleben der Website nicht intuitiv hervor. Viele Leser sind sich nicht bewusst, dass die Inhalte, die sie lesen, von Freiwilligen geschrieben und regelmäßig aktualisiert werden, oder dass sie potenziell auch dazu beitragen können.

Darüber hinaus erschwert der große Erfahrungsunterschied zwischen unseren verschiedenen Produkten (Desktop, Apps und Mobile Web) es den Lesern, die Zusammenhänge zwischen unseren Produkten zu erkennen und sie mit den Inhalten selbst zu assoziieren. Dies führt zu einem Mangel an Einheitlichkeit im Konzept der Wikimedia-Seiten.

Zusammenfassung nach Nutzergruppen:

Goals
Here are the outcomes we're working towards:


 * Make it easier for readers to 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 2019 – January 2020: Continued user testing and design refinements
 * Phase 4+: To be determined

Metrics
Below is a draft of the core metrics we want to measure through the course of the project. As we define the changes we want to make with more specificity, we will expand and iterate on this list.

Increase utility among our existing audiences, proxied by:


 * Interactions
 * Increase searches per session by 5% over the course of the project
 * Increase language switching per project by 5% over the course of the project
 * Affinity
 * Increase in positive and welcoming sentiments towards the site (via surveys and user testing)
 * Increase in sentiments of trust and credibility (measured via surveys and user testing)

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: /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: /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)
 * User testing on usertesting.com (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.

Phase 1: Design-Ideen
A few of the many ideas that have been suggested are below. Please add any prominent ideas and links you know of:

Focusing on the content, distinguish content from user-interface Easier access to everyday actions Putting things in logical and useful places
 * Collapsible sections in sidebar
 * Examples: Hebrew Wikipedia, ...
 * Research: Usability initiative research on collapsible languages links, Usability initiative mockups on collapsible sections within the sidebar
 * Collapsible sidebar
 * Examples: Wide Skin (enwiki script), Hide Vector sidebar (enwiki script), Timeless skin sidebar (responsive-layout), ...
 * Floating sidebar
 * Examples: FloatSide (enwiki script), ...
 * Sticky header with search, table of contents, edit links
 * Examples: FloatHead (enwiki script), FloatHead (another enwiki script), Floater (enwiki script), Winter (historical prototype), Timeless (alternative skin), ...
 * Research: Usability-wiki
 * More prominent language switching (moving the language switcher to the top of the page)
 * Examples: Timeless skin at 1325px or wider and at 1085px or thinner, ...
 * Sticky table-headers
 * Examples: Gadget-StickyTableHeaders (enwiki gadget)
 * Consolidated user menu (e.g. collapsing things like "Log out", "Preferences", and "Beta", inside a dropdown menu)
 * Examples: Compact personal bar
 * Preferences for logged out users
 * Examples: Accessibility settings/preferences (T91201), ...
 * Moving article actions from the sidebar to within the article
 * Examples: Winter, Timeless skin at 1085px or thinner, ...