Research:Left-hand navigation

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

User experience and technical documentation

• Documentation of the navigation sidebar