Talk:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/Testing

Definition of useful

What are you going to measure in those tests? Clicks I suppose, but clicks can be interpreted in various ways (for instance I personally think a click towards a sister project is more valuable than one to Wikipedia, for various reasons). Anything else? You probably give for granted your analytics pipeline by now, using also that "searchToken" URL parameter in Special:Search, but I can't find any documentation for it and I don't understand if there will be something more for this test. Nemo 08:06, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the late response - I didn't see this comment until today. :( We are the Discovery team, so our main focus is helping visitors to discover more content and more knowledge in Wikipedia and all the other projects. For these tests, the hard data to be collected will be from measuring the clicks to the sister projects from the newly displayed search results. We hope to show that not only are the search results relevant, but that more visitors will use the other projects as well. There will be two links for each search result displayed in the right hand side bar. One link to the article/media that was the top relevant result from a sister project. The other link will be to do the same search in that other sister project -- showing a new search results page in that sister project. We'll be capturing both sets of clicks. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Design review: Add cross-wiki search results in a right hand sidebar

This is a great improvement, kudos to the team who's worked on it and makes it happen. Here are a few comments that came to my mind after playing with the live demo for a bit.

1. Sidebar links appear in black instead of blue.
   • Currently users may not identify there are clickable links on the sidebar.
2. The text (more) is ambiguous.
   • Plus is there a reason to have parenthesis around the word more? I suggest replacing it with See more, Load more, or See all. Generally I like to see a verb that describes an action.
3. Have a faster understanding of the presentation of results.
   • Users can read Create the page "~ogg" on this wiki! See also the search results found.. They see a list of results below, and now they can read Sister projects on the right with some more results.
     • It feels like the user is thrown a bunch of results and now he has work to do in order to sort them out. I would like the UI to guide the user through these results more. I'm an advocate of Less is more, and less cluttered user interfaces in general.
       • In regard to this, I believe the presentation of the sister project results introduced with this test is actually good (particularly for a first test). However, the overall experience is negatively impacted by the presentation of the wiki results on the left. In other words, we need to simplify the existing UI first in order to get the (most) benefits of the great new features we introduce aside.
     • I would like to try having a similar heading title as Sister projects on the left, saying something like: Results found on this wiki. In contrast, try replacing Sister projects with Results from sister projects..
     • I'd love us to find a more accurate, more descriptive label than sister projects.
   • The list of results on the left looks cluttered in contrast with the combination of white space + cards with darker background on the right, thus the eyes are running away from the cluttered area as they are attracted by the cleaner right side.
     • I think this is counterproductive, because the primary list of results is the left list. I believe this is where we want the user to first look at, before paying attention to the secondary list of results.
   • Is it a sidebar? It seems to be a sidebar, try to make it look like an actual sidebar.

JGirault (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, JGirault (WMF), I've opened up a ticket in our Search board for these points! DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 07:55, 13 February 2017 (UTC)