2019:Growing Wikimedia's Readership/Updating the desktop experience for Wikimedia
 | This is an Accepted submission for the Readership space at Wikimania 2019. |
Description
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Let's improve the desktop interface! Come help us think about and discuss how we can do this.
Context: our movement has committed to expanding and allowing “anyone who shares our vision” to participate. We believe our projects should reflect this goal by being familiar and intuitive, welcoming, and easily recognizable to readers and editors around the globe. While the WMF has invested a significant amount of work into reaching these goals on the mobile web as well as the mobile apps, it has been a long time since we’ve updated our desktop experience.
Plan: starting in the fall of 2019, the Readers web team at the WMF will begin improving the desktop experience to better fit the expectations of our movement strategy. We would like to revisit the changes the desktop interface has experienced over the years and begin a discussion on what a modern and welcoming desktop experience could be. What are the needs of our readers? What are the needs of our current and future communities? What might it look like for the desktop experience to be more inclusive? How do we welcome change while retaining our identity? How do we achieve consistency between our experiences on desktop and mobile? We would like to discuss these questions and evaluate ideas for the future direction of this project.
- Project page: mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements (minimal details to start, a lot more to come from everyone)
Relationship to the theme
[edit | edit source]This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:
The ability to provide interfaces that are inclusive and intuitive is central to the ability of others to learn using our products. An improved desktop experience will make it easier to read and to navigate for all users, not only those who currently know our products. We hope that this session, and our work which comes out of it, will aid in our efforts to provide quality education resources (SDG 4) and reduce inequalities among our audiences (SDG 10). We will also work towards the sustainability of our structure and our communities (SDG 11). By encouraging consistency among our platforms, removing clutter, and making it easy for new people to navigate among our experiences, we move towards sustainable design and decreasing the difficulty with which our communities can expand.
Session outcomes
[edit | edit source]At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:
- Introduce the project ideas to our communities
- Discuss historical changes to the desktop experience and the conditions under which they came about
- Discuss design and user experience
- Discuss technical approaches (collect pros and cons for each)
- Identify the needs of readers and editors with various levels of experience
- Showcase and evaluate ideas for a refreshed desktop experience
Session leader(s)
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OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
Session type
[edit | edit source]Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:
- Workshop to identify and try to solve problem
- Lecture
Requirements
[edit | edit source]The session will work best with these conditions:
- Room: A medium-sized classroom with a projector + screen
- Audience: All Wikimania participants are welcome
- Recording: We would like to request to film this session so that we can share it with the wider community