Finding content inside Flow / Discussions: March 2015

Findings

Basically we found that the search and sort functionality proposed by the Collaboration team to be a big improvement for these users finding content (topics, other users, etc) inside talk pages. Because talk pages have no search functionality participants rely on "ctrl or command f" add lots of scrolling to find content within a talk page. Potentially, these functionalities, if added to Flow will make it easier to find content when people are using Flow pages vs. when using the current talk pages.

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