Wikimedia Research/Design Research

submit a design research request

Design Research is a part of the Wikimedia Research Team. We collaborate with the WIkimedia Community, Research, Design, Product and Technology, and Community Engagement. Through our research we seek to understand how individuals use technology to interact with Wikimedia projects. Our work helps inform decisions about the design of Wikimedia projects with the goal of helping users interact with Wikipedia and each other in more practical and meaningful ways.

Discover with us!
User centered design starts with you!

Whether you're already an experienced user, you've never touched the edit tab, or you're somewhere in between, your contributions are valuable and welcome.

We invite you to participate in future design research. Help us discover the needs of individuals around the globe.

Take our survey

Complete this quick survey to let us know you would like to participate in our research. The survey is hosted by Qualtrics, a third party software, which has been reviewed by our Legal and Contracts team. Your answers help us match you to future research projects. You can opt out at anytime by sending an email to optoutresearch@wikimedia.org and asking us to remove your information.

Start a conversation

You can also let us know that you are interested in participating by pressing the "Discussions" tab above and leaving us a message.

What we do
The Design Research Team works with a wide variety of individuals all around the globe. Some are already familiar with Wikimedia projects, and some are not. We observe how research participants use technology to interact with Wikimedia projects, and we talk with them about their experiences.

In partnership with our research participants, we are able to generate rich data in the form of interviews, surveys, usability studies, and field notes.

We feel it is important to keep our research public, so we publish it on wiki and in open research archives where anyone can learn from it. WMF teams will also use this research to help decide what they should build next and how to build it.

Why we do it
We learn a lot when we observe how individuals interact with Wikimedia projects and when they share their stories with us. All of the information we collect helps us make better decisions about what improvements to make next and how to make using Wikimedia projects a better experience for everyone.

Who benefits
WMF teams, Wikimedia movement partners, and others who want to understand what people want and need from the technologies they use.

How we do it
Design Research uses different methods to gather knowledge including generative and evaluative research.

Here is a list of methods we employ.

Cross - team projects
Contextual inquiry

This research is informing several product teams, the Communications, Partnerships, and Community Resources Teams, as well as WMF as a whole. We implemented the Mexico contextual inquiry with a small team of staff from Wikimedia Foundation (see link below for description) and are collaborating with Reboot, a design research consultancy who does contextual inquiries regularly and provided the required operations, security and logistics and expertise for this work in Nigeria and India.
 * Reading/Mexico Readers Research
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers

 Personas
 * Personas for product development (first round)

Workshops  Presentations:
 * Design Research Workshop
 * Persona Workshop
 * Wikimedia Research/Usability testing

Editing
Design Research/Editing Vertical KIT meeting minutes
 * Editing, general
 * Editing Tasks Survey (February - March 2015)
 * Editing Tasks Card Sort (February - March 2015)


 * Editing on desktop/laptop
 * Moderated Sessions for VE discovery and usability, brand new and casual editors (March 2015)
 * UserTesting.com for basic editing tasks on VE, brand new editors (April 2015)
 * Usability testing citations dialogue on VE, brand new editors (May 2015)
 * Collection of VE Research
 * Heuristic Evaluation of image upload in the visual editor, (October, 2015)
 * Link Inspector Usability Testing November 2015
 * Mobile editing
 * Discovery
 * Heuristic evaluation of visual editing on iOS and Android phones September 2015
 * Heuristic evaluation of visual editing on Android, Mobile October 2015


 * Mobile Contribution Discovery at Wikimania 2015


 * Guerrilla Testing for iOS iPad Visual Editor
 * Heuristic Evaluation for Visual Editor (iOS)
 * Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Web Visual Editor (Android)
 * Guerrilla Testing for iOS iPad Visual Editor
 * Wikigrok
 * Guerrilla Testing Wikigrok Version A
 * Guerrilla Testing, November 2014: Wikigrok Version B
 * Guerrilla Testing, December 2014: Wikigrok Version B v.2


 * Task suggestions
 * '''Account creation:
 * Account creation user experience/User testing
 * Draft_namespace/Usability_testing
 * Collaboration


 *  Echo 
 * Cross-wiki notifications research — October 2015 - January 2016
 * Notification page prototype research — February - March 2016
 * Notification user survey — February - May 2016


 *  Flow 
 * Flow Moderated Testing, November, 2014: talk pages and Flow
 * Finding content inside Flow / Discussions: March 2015


 * Workflows
 * Community process workflow interviews (June 2015)
 * New editor curation tools experience interviews (September 2015)


 * Guerrilla Testing, March 24, 2015: Description editing


 * Wikimedia Language engineering
 * Initial evaluation of article recommendtions
 * Content Translation campaign prototype testing — October 2015 - January 2016


 * Multimedia
 * Media Viewer
 * Media Viewer and Image Page View (July 2014)


 * Media Viewer Iteration Usability (August, 2014)
 * Media Viewer Enable / Disable Flow Usability testing (September 2014)
 * Media Viewer Validation, Moderated Testing (November, 2014)

Reading

 * Some current Reading team design research
 * Reading in general
 * Reader Behavior Exploratory Research (February - March 2015)


 * Guerrilla Testing for iOS App


 * Acquisition of new users:
 * Onboarding new Wikipedians
 * Guided tours


 * ''' Apps
 * Guerrilla Testing On-boarding Page and some discovery about readers and their thoughts on editing
 * Guerrilla Testing Table of Contents discovery
 * Guerrilla Testing iOS App
 * Guerrilla Testing Reading Behavior (App Layouts) October 3, 2014
 * Guerrilla Testing iOS 5 Navigation October 2015


 * ''' Mobile Web Gather / Collections
 * Renaming Survey, March 2015
 * Heuristic Evaluation, May 2015
 * Usability/Understanding Moderated Sessions: Findings & Recommendations, June 2015


 * '''Link previews
 * [Research results]

Search and Discovery

 * Guerrilla Testing, December 17, 2014: Search and Search results

User experience / beta features

 * Winter
 * Winter / Fixed Header
 * Other User Tests