I have run two sets of user tests with Winter to determine the usability of in-header page action icons and whether or not users can easily recognize their personal tools menu and the search box, especially after scrolling in the page. The results are not encouraging for the in-header icons.
Two tests were run because the first test had some possible errors and confusions. The second test (Winter Harness Two Electric Boogaloo) had some modifications to the flow to avoid people getting lost on user talk pages (this was the result of the first version of Harness Two telling them to click on the Speech Bubble icon in the top right if they were lost - but they had scrolled to the top already). H2:EB corrected this by directing them to the context action ribbon. * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Winter#Harness_Two:_Winter * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Winter#Harness_Two:_Electric_Boogaloo * Only *one* user out of ten correctly used the in-header page action icons. Further, his language indicated that he had some icon confusion: he thought that only a few icons were added, and that existing ones were moved (e.g., history and edit were new, but the watch list icon was still the same). * Most users were unable to recognize the personal tools section as being "my stuff" unless their username was ''also'' included. Once the username was gone, it was invisible to them (with rare exceptions, and mostly by accident then). * No users had trouble with the search box. At all. * Most users ended up using the context action ribbon and ignored other navigation hints. * The in-header TOC might as well be invisible. * At this point, with 10 testers and a 10% success rate, I'd say that the benefits of putting page icons in the header are outweighed by the negatives of losing the username for discoverability. Discussion here: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Winter&workflow=rr0ke21yl3nttgjl --- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Design mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
