WMDE Engineering/UserExperience

We want to improve the usefulness and usability of Wikimedia projects.

How we work – Lean UX
We combine creativity and research to create functionality and interfaces.





Tasks:
 * Usability Testing
 * Needfinding
 * Create Interface Designs
 * Consulting on UX topics and help others to solve minor UX problems themselves.

Needfinding
What are our communities’ motivations, activities and problems? What is useful for them?

For this we talk to users and/or observe them doing their work.

Create Interface Designs


We design new interfaces or improve older ones using sketches on paper, drawings in Inkscape or programming in HTML and CSS. The designs consider usability rules and Wikimedia styleguides.

Usability Testing
Does the interface work like we expect? Is it usable?

Consulting on UX topics
We help with suggestions and assessment of product plans or interfaces.

Tools

 * Pen and Paper we use to do early drafts and interactive paper prototypes
 * Inkscape is an editor for SVGs and can be used to create mockups, banners or icons.
 * Libre Office Impress allows us to create slideshows as well as to create prototypes (Article talks about Powerpoint, but the methods apply to Impress, too)
 * Recording your screen can help others to understand workflows or problems in use better. Each Operating System has its own solutions for this.
 * Cutycap is a command line based too which will generate an (semi) editable (e.g. using Inkscape) svg image from a webpage, e.g.  cutycapt --url=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite --out=WP.svg  will generate an image of the German Wikipedia's homepage and will put that in the file WP.svg in your home folder.