Reading/Multimedia/Media Viewer/Improvements

Screenshot of the Media Viewer's new 'minimal design' - See prototype'

Here is our plan for improvements to Media Viewer, a new feature that aims to provide a better viewing experience on Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites.

These improvements have now been completed. Our goals for these improvements were to make Media Viewer easier to use by readers and casual editors, our primary target users for this tool.

To that end, we created a new 'minimal design' including these features:

a more prominent button linking to the File: page - Done
an easier way to enlarge images - Done
clearer icons for Download and Share - Done
an easier way to disable the tool for personal use - Done
image captions right below the image - Done

These improvements are based on usability testing and community suggestions collected in recent weeks. Based on this feedback, the multimedia team prototyped and tested new designs, and incrementally developed them in September and October 2014, after they were validated by user research.

Goals

Media Viewer Update Slides

Our primary target users for Media Viewer are readers and casual editors.
For these users, we aim to make Media Viewer easier to use and more informative.
For power users, we aim to make it easy to disable Media Viewer if they don't want it.
For all users, we want to address any critical performance or licensing issues.

As part of this new release, we also aim to clarify the relationship between Media Viewer and the File: description page:

Media Viewer offers a quick preview for browsing images, right where you are.
The File Page remains the place where you can get (or edit) all the details and file metadata.

For more information, view these slides.

User Benefits

We have developed a new 'minimal design' to deliver key benefits more effectively to our target users: readers and casual editors.

Here are the benefits we aim to offer to these casual users, based on feedback we collected through surveys and talk pages. Features or improvements that can support those benefits are shown in parenthesis. We have prototyped and developed these improvements and are now testing them with target users.

Primary benefits

preview larger images (click on thumbnails to view them in Media Viewer)
learn about the image (read full caption and/or full description)
get more details (go to file page)
browse related images (next/previous)
enlarge image (see original file)
disable Media Viewer (cog icon to opt out)

Secondary benefits

share this image (copy the file link)
download this file (select size you want)
find out who created this file (author, source, license)
go back to article page (close Media Viewer)
re-enable Media Viewer (cog icon on file page)

Tasks

Here are development tasks we're planning for Media Viewer in September and October 2014, based on what we have learned from our ongoing user research and community consultation.

Released

These improvements have been released:

A caption or description right below the image (new) - Done
Support metadata cleanup drive (new) - Done
Enlarge images by clicking on them - Done
"More Details" button - A more prominent link to the File: page - Done
"More Details" should include project icon - Done
Separate icon for Download - Done
Clearer icon for Share or Embed - Done
An easier way for any user to individually disable the tool for their personal use - Done
Re-enable Media Viewer from a File Page - Done
Rename File page button to better label than "Expand view" - Done
a simpler metadata panel with fewer items - Done
Show file page link if attribution is missing - Done
Fix 'Licensed under Fair Use' credits - Done
Attribution prompt improvement - Done
Pre-render thumbnails on backend for new uploads - Done
Make MediaViewer text larger in Monobook - Done
Track views and clicks on Share, Download, Embed - Done
Collect number of times someone copies share/embed text - Done
Update 'File: Page vs. MMV' performance dashboard with improved user data - Done

"Must have"

All 'must-have' improvements that were considered critical for this release have been released.

"Should have"

These important improvements were considered -- but may need to be pushed to future releases:

Additional attribution/licensing improvements consistent with metadata cleanup effort.

"Could have"

These improvements are 'nice to have', but are not deemed critical for this release -- they will be considered for future releases:

Adjust the ‘Go back’ function for Media Viewer
Faster access to file names - design done
Additional performance improvements for users on slow connections - needs more investigation.

Metrics

These metrics improvements are also being considered to measure the impact of features in this release -- could be pushed to future releases:

New Designs

Screenshots of new designs from the updated Media Viewer prototype. The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team is testing and developing these new improvements based on user testing and community feedback.

"Chamonix flowers photo" by Fabrice Florin (via Flickr). Licensed under CC BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Prototype

We created a rough prototype of our new 'minimal design', to deliver the above benefits and validate the features above with target users. That new design is shown at the top of this page -- and can also be viewed here.

Here is where you can test the new Media Viewer prototype on our 'slow' alpha site:

Demos:

User Test pages:

Rapa Nui National Park (test article 1)
New York City (test article 2)

(please don't edit either page, as they are being used for our ongoing user research)