Wikimedia Research/Design Research/Sandbox

What We Do
Design Research collaborates with Design, Analytics, Engineering, Product and the Wikipedia Community in order to help define what, at a high level teams should build and why (Generative Research). Also, Design Research supports iteration of concepts and functionality toward a usable and intuitive experience for users (Evaluative Research). Design Research, including both generative and evaluative research rely on a toolkit of research methodologies to provide findings informing decision making, concept development and concept iteration. Though the design team has been performing evaluative research to support iteration, design research is a new department at Wikimedia Foundation, and is growing and evolving to support the movement, the community and the foundation.

Growth UX Research
The purpose of the Growth team is to find ways to attract and retain Wikipedia editors. Here is a list of projects the Growth team is working on toward accomplishing their goals and the UX research that has informed each project. Also see the Research and Data team's contributions here.
 * Acquisition of new users:
 * Editor campaign
 * Anonymous editor acquisition
 * Account creation user experience
 * Research: Observing average web users creating accounts
 * Login redesign
 * Timestamp position modification

Activation & Retention of new users:
 * Guided tours
 * Onboarding new Wikipedians
 * Wikipedia article creation and a new Draft namespace
 * Post-edit feedback
 * Task suggestions

Reactivation of existing users:

Necromancy

Phones (Apps, mobile web, USSD)
Guerrilla Testing On-boarding Page and some discovery about readers and their thoughts on editing
 * iPhone App
 * Guerrilla Testing Table of Contents discovery


 * iPhone mobile web
 * Heuristic Evaluation Visual Editor on iPad mobile web


 * Android Phone App
 * Android Phone (mobile web)
 * Wikipedia Zero (USSD)

Tablets mobile web

 * iPad
 * Heuristic Evaluation Visual Editor on iPad mobile web


 * Android Tablet
 * Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Web Visual Editor (Android)

Visual Editor

 * Heuristic Evaluation for Visual Editor (iOS)
 * Guerrilla Testing for iOS App
 * Guerrilla Testing iOS ipad Visual Editor


 * Mobile Web Visual Editor

User Experience / Beta Features

 * Winter / Fixed Header

Project Queuing

 * |Trello Planning Board

Archives of Broader Wikimedia Research Team
Wikimedia Research Portal

Methodologies for Qualitative Design Research
Heuristic Evaluation / Cognitive Walkthrough

Guerrilla Research / Cafe Research

Unmoderated remote usability testing

Moderated remote usability testing

Contextual Inquiry

Design Ethnography

Tools for Qualitative Design Research
Google Hang Outs OnAir - "Usability lab" for moderated, remote generative and evaluative research.

Usertesting.com — Unmoderated remote scripted usability testing

Conceptcodify.com — Unmoderated card sorting tool

SurveyMonkey.com —Unomderated survey tool with some analysis tools