Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Portal retrospective 2016-07-07
Format
editThis retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.
Action Items from last month
edit- Chris: Update the "Project portals" page on Meta (task T136163)
- Done (enough)
- Deb: create rough mocks of some of the ideas for the future work and add to page on wiki for further discussion
- Done (search results)
- Deb: send email(s) on production releases and upcoming A/B tests
- Done (so far--more to come)
- Kevin: Will continue to suggest A/B test retros at times
- There didn't seem to be opportunities this past month; no tests scheduled, so moot
- Kevin: Try to resolve code review delays
- Kevin will continue to work on this
- Kevin: Schedule one hour for next month's retro, since a half hour was too short
- Done
What happened since the last retro (June 6)
edit- We're getting a new analyst! (Partially Portal related)
- Qualtrics survey on "how you arrived on the portal" launched and wrapped up
- Asked community about adding mobile app badges to the portal page (lots of feedback and the issue has been shelved for a few weeks)
- Wikimania
- "Portal offsite" in Poland
- Wrote documentation about portal development process and guide to contributing
- and thus: got some community contributions to the portal
- Added USA regions to dashboard analytics
- Got the ball rolling on getting portal text into translatewiki.net
- Added first visit clickthroughs to the dashboard
- production releases of legal links, readmes, etc for portal
- Jan at Design offsite in SF
Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well
edit- Wikimania and (small) team offsite in Warsaw
- face-to-face time Deb/Jan was very helpful
- Data results from last A/B test for language dropdown (collapsing lang by article count)
- Help from Chris on navigating community talks dealing with portal
- Volunteer contributions to portal page ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/WPOR/history/master/ )
- got the ops/script blocking task fixed for updating portal stats
Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know about the last month
edit- people are interested in the portal and everyone has an opinion +1 +1
Middle finger: Something that did not go well
edit- There's apparently a sustained spike in no-actions and a drop in searches (visible on dashboard)
- Ticket is open to investigate: task T139109
- Jan feeling the need to +2 own code a couple of times.
- and community pushback for doing so
- we should have a discussion about our team norms, constraints, etc.
- Small changes usually can get someone to +2; large visual (javascript) changes are harder to get someone
- Julien is the only other Discovery person well-qualified to review
- Distinction between visual (html/css) and tricky code (javascript)--or both in the same commit
- Distinction between "does it work" vs. "is this the best technical approach" vs. "is this the right UX"
- something about the communities response with the app badges - frustrating
- asking the community about adding mobile app download badges to portal page (pushback from internal to WMF and external)
Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other
edit- Deb did (and continues to do!) a great job multi-managing teams while Dan was away
- Jan always super helpful and seemingly glad to help +1+1
- Talking with community members and other WMF'ers, chapters during wikimania
- everyone wanted to know what the Discovery team was doing (or suggest things we should be doing)
- Lots of goodwill from those conversations
- We should do more in-person outreach (e.g. conferences)
Pinky: A little thing (good or bad) that would be easy to overlook
edit- Translation setup for incorporating new words into portal (for sister project descriptive text) from community
- Lots of collaboration between different teams; quite a bit of work
- Splitting the translatable text out was slightly challenging, and then gluing them back together
- Jan learned quite a bit about translations and localizations
- Translating our (major) communications should be more common (this is on me - CK)
- Takes effort, and also takes time (like a week). Need to account for that when planning.
- What are people requesting to be translated? Targeted comms, such as mobile badges and question marks
Action items
edit- Deb: send out email RfC for language dropdown and chat up the new updated page design
- if all goes well, push it into production in next few weeks
- Kevin: Carry idea of a/b test retros over to the search team
- Kevin: Continue to work on timely code reviews
- Chris: Communicate that after we wrap up a few things on the portal that we'll take a bit of a less active role on the portal for a while (focus on accomplishments so far)
- Mikhail: provide some data (ticket has already been created)