Finding content inside Flow / Discussions: March 2015

Goals for Moderated Sessions
To better understand from new/casual contributors how they find content and interact with the UI on a Talk page (using both discussions and flow)
 * 1) How do the participants find specific content inside a talk page?
 * 2) What is easy and what is difficult in both the discussions and flow contexts?
 * 3) How do people interact with the UI in both discussions and flow when they want to find some specific content and navigate a talk page?
 * 4) Is the current design of a talk page (discussions) easy for new users to interact with or not?
 * 5) Is the current design of a talk page using flow easy for new users to interact with or not?

Discovery Process / Testing Methodology

 * 1) Define the users to invite to participate:
 * 2) "New/casual contributors" = less than 10 edits
 * 3) Design research protocol and structured data collection for the research sessions
 * 4) Find the right participants who are willing to volunteer an hour to collaborate with us
 * 5) Implement 5-6 hour long research sessions and collect data; usability testing and discovery of people’s experience
 * 6) Analysis of data: review collected data and look for patterns, insights, and findings
 * 7) Synthesis: what does the data mean for the design of existing talk pages and Flow discussion pages?
 * 8) Report findings: results can be found on this page once the research is complete.
 * 9) Recordings of the research sessions with participants who opted to share with everyone will be posted below.

Research session Debriefs:
P6
 * likes flow better than talk pages because
 * more intuitive
 * more like other discussion places he is used to, like Reddit
 * filtering
 * liked having the link to the user's page and user's contribs page
 * comfortable with wikitext editing
 * was able to figure out wiki markup quickly, and described his learning process to us
 * heavily dependent on ctrl+f
 * doesn't like how he can't search for a word in the flow topics dropdown
 * when reading talk pages, he looks at some user contributions pages to check their other edits/expertise on specific topic
 * partner didn't know about talk pages, even though she uses wikipedia all the time for school/other
 * thinks this is one of the biggest issues around talk pages, that most people don't know about them