Aryeh Gregor <simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com> wrote: > [...] > Data is important. It's also not always possible to gather. When > multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the > other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. > But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or > a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are > people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more > clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is > that good or bad? If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage > links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to > scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's > obviously ridiculous.
> As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard to apply > correctly. Sometimes you really have to use judgment. But we could > still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click > interlanguage links? Do they usually understand the language they're > reading the article in, or not? We could have a little > multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time > when people click on an interlanguage link. > My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal. Yes, people will see > it for what it is and they'll be able to find their language easily > enough if they look. But it's distracting, and it's not obvious > without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's anything > below it. If we could use some heuristic to pick a few languages to > display, with a prominent "More" link at the bottom, I suspect that > would be superior. > But first we should gather data on click rates for the list fully > expanded and unexpanded. Per-page click rates are important here -- > many articles have no interlanguage links, so will obviously pull down > the average click rate despite being unaffected by the change. What's > the trend like as articles have more interlanguage links? How many > more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty languages > as opposed to five? Can we plot that? For each wiki separately, for > preference? > All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of course. Maybe the > usability team doesn't have the manpower. If so, does anyone > qualified volunteer? If not, we have to make decisions without data > -- and that doesn't automatically mean "keep the status quo", nor > "change it back if people complain loudly". It means someone who > happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a > judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available. > [...] But why base only the decision for interlanguage links on "click data"? A rough estimate would say that the "Edit" button is used by far less than 1% as well. (Not to speak of "View history" or the various fundraiser banners.) Yet, the original grant explicitly stated as a *goal* to ease the edit process. So there is not only "evidence" to consider, but also "policy". We do want to emphasize: "Everyone can edit!", so we put an "Edit" button up there, even if it might disturb someone's mind with "clutter". Do we want to advertize: "This article is available in 100+ languages!", so someone when reading another article without that long list will think about translating this article to his mother tongue? Or maybe just say: "Awesome!" Tim _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l