Wikipedia.org Portal Improvements

The Wikipedia.org Portal Improvements project is an effort to improve http://www.wikipedia.org portal page, to better serve Wikipedia users. Some of the earliest efforts in this project are around measuring how our users use the portal page, learning our user expectation around this page and how we can better serve them.

Rationale
The Wikimedia Discovery team wants to improve the experience for the users visiting Wikipedia.org portal page and help them get to the information they are looking for as fast as possible. Wikipedia.org portal page gets around 10 million daily pageviews, which is roughly 1.5-2% of our total page views. To better serve this large audience, we want to make sure that this page is easy to understand and use. We want to increase the usability of the search text box, so more people will run a search query and get to their preferred article faster. We want to decrease the number of people who leave the page without continuing on to Wikipedia. We also want to better understand what people expect from this page so we can address their needs. In the future, we want to serve language, location and time specific content on this page too.

Initial Goals

 * Decrease bounce rate on wikipedia.org portal page
 * Increase searches and clicks on results from the search textbox
 * Increase clickthrough to non-top-10-language wikis
 * Increase clickthrough for other Wikimedia projects

A/B tests
As part of this initiative the Discovery team will be running a few quick A/B tests on Wikipedia.org to measure if the proposed improvements are beneficial to our users. Here is a tentative list of the first few A/B tests with the corresponding visual mocks ups of the proposed changes:
 * 1) A bigger and more prominent search box and search button.
 * 2) Showing thumbnail images and Wikidata descriptions in typeahead suggestion box
 * 3) Collapsing the Wikipedia globe, moving search box to the top
 * 4) Collapsing non-top-10-language Wiki links into a Universal Language Selector for better usability

Tentative Future Ideas

 * Bringing in relevant content from other Wikimedia projects on this page
 * Recommending articles to read and edit
 * Showing trending articles to read and edit
 * Localize the content on this page depending on where the visitor is visiting from
 * Show more timely content
 * More visual content