Thanks for starting this thread, Julien!
This idea very nicely aligns with the 'revolutionary' and 'evolutionary'
improvements idea that I've been harping about for a while. The "labs" page
is our space to do revolutionary prototypes, making some crazy things. And
the production portal page is where we do evolutionary testing, changing
things slowly and more deliberately. This is the only way to find new
maximas and not get stuck at a local maxima,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_and_minima
Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on this.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 5:58 PM, Julien Girault <jgirault(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
The Discovery Portal team has been thinking about a
Portal Labs page.
The idea is that we can implement some revolutionary ideas for our portal
page, things that are completely different than what the current portal
page looks like, and deploy it on this site for real users to use. But
without imposing a disruptive user experience to our users. We can put a
link to this page on the production portal page (in the bottom?), and users
can have an option to bookmark the page, and maybe make one of the
experiments their default.
We would have two trains:
- Slow train: running regular A/B tests (like the one we just ran) on the
official portal page and deploying small improvements as we learn.
- Faster train: "Revolutionary" prototypes in Labs where we also collect
traffic and clickthrough rate to measure user satisfaction. We can also
implement a "Send a Feedback" feature (or have a link on the prototype page
that points to a Phab ticket where community can add comments/feedback).
To give you an example of what we mean by revolutionary ideas, I uploaded
some of my research time work:
https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/
Pay closer attention to:
Trending Showing top 9 articles (grid)
<https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/react-top9-cards/>Trending Showing
top 10 articles (full screen)
<https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/react-top10-fs/>
This would allow us to think outside the box and test different
layouts/features, with real users who chose to.
This is kind of a crazy idea, and we want to know what you all think about
it. Also we would need some naming ideas for it. Portal labs, or beta
portal, or something else.
Please let us know what you think about this, how you think we can go
towards making this happen and what we should name it.
Thanks!
Julien
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