Research:Left-hand navigation
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Background
Clicktracking on the Community Portal page suggests that readers and editors are making heavy use of the left-hand site navigation. By optimizing the information architecture of data and links provided in this area, we may be able to provide users with useful deep links into the site as well as provide links to activities we'd like to encourage such as creating accounts, curating pages, or participating in Village Pump discussions.
Current nav structure
| Primary Label & Link | Secondary Label & Link | Makes sense to keep? |
|---|---|---|
| Main page | yes | |
| Contents | maybe | |
| Featured content | yes | |
| Current events | yes | |
| Random Article | yes | |
| Donate to Wikipedia | yes | |
| Wikipedia Shop | yes | |
| Interaction (section) | rename | |
| Help | yes | |
| About Wikipedia | footer only | |
| Community portal | yes | |
| Recent changes | yes | |
| Contact Wikipedia | footer only | |
| Toolbox (section) | rename | |
| What links here | no | |
| Related changes | no | |
| Upload file | yes | |
| Special pages | yes | |
| Permanent link | no | |
| Print/export (section) | no | |
| Create a book | no | |
| Download as PDF | no | |
| Printable Version | no | |
| Languages (section) | yes (dynamic based on IP or preferences?) |
Additional/alternate sidebar links on other wikis:
- Report a mistake - a pop-up form where readers can report a mistake to a queue or fix it themselves (Russian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia)
- First step - a simple introduction page to Wikipedia (French Wikipedia)
- Participate - overview of how to contribute (German Wikipedia)
- Creating a new article - tutorial for creating a new article (German Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia)
- FAQ - reporting a mistake is the first commonly asked question (Polish Wikipedia)
- Disclaimer - about using Wikipedia (Polish Wikipedia)
- For readers/For Wikipedians tabs (Polish Wikipedia)
- Maintenance - tasks and cleanup categories (Portuguese Wikipedia)
- Welcome page - for new users (Portuguese Wikipedia)
- Sandbox (Portuguese Wikipedia)
- Village pump (Italian Wikipedia)
- The Wikipedian - like the EN Signpost (Italian Wikipedia)
Justification
In service of reader and editor engagement, we should provide the most useful links and tools possible in the left-hand navigation.
- Impact: A navigation change will affect all users of ENWP. For a positive impact, we'll need to surface links most relevant to the tasks users from newbies to veterans do on the site.
- Community: During the usability initiative and the rollout of the Vector skin, there was a tremendous amount of dissent about the left-hand navigation. We anticipate this experiment will generate similar conflict.
- Workload: The workload for making this change is small; the load on the servers to collect clicktracking data will be very large and should be considered before moving ahead with this experiment.
Research questions
RQ1. <research question>
- H1a. <hypothesis>
...
- H1n. <hypothesis>
Overall metrics
- Metric 1
- <metric description>
...
- Metric n
- <metric description>
Experiment 1: NPO-style nav
Utilize a navigation structure more common to non-profit websites, where links are sorted categorically by verbs that encourage the user to do something - Contribute, Explore, Get Involved, etc.
| Primary Label & Link | Secondary Label & Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Home page | rename Main to home | |
| Contribute | call to engage with WP | |
| Become an Editor | Explicit call to edit - link tbd | |
| Curate pages | Promote new page curation toolkit | |
| Find tasks | point users to available tasks | |
| Explore Wikipedia | listing of content areas | |
| Featured content | highlight good content | |
| Community portal | revamped CP will help newbies | |
| Recent changes | important to veteran editors | |
| Current events | highlight current-ness of content | |
| Random Article | good entry point for users who don't know what they want | |
| Portals | promote portals/groups idea | |
| The Signpost | surface newsletter of current activities | |
| Village pump | promote community discussion | |
| Find Help | Point newbies reworked help pages | |
| Get Involved | promote other ways to interact with WP | |
| Donate to Wikipedia | make em give $ | |
| Wikipedia Shop | make em give $ for schwag | |
| Languages | yes (dynamic based on IP or preferences?) |
Contextual content tools
| Primary Label & Link | Notes |
|---|---|
| What links here | is this useful? |
| Recent changes | duplicated in history and last modified timestamp |
| Permanent link | is this useful? |
| Cite this page | is this useful? |
| Upload file | shortcut to upload images (maybe contextually available on edit screen) |
| Improve this page | AFT jumplink |
| Create a book | Create book tools |
Analysis requirements
Results
User experience and technical documentation
- Documentation of the navigation sidebar