User:DTankersley (WMF)/Sandbox/Roadmap

DRAFT: Wikipedia.org Portal Page Roadmap for fiscal year 2015/2016

Goals

TL;DR: To create a visually stunning page which incites curiosity and becomes the first stop of a long journey of discovery into the sum of all knowledge within Wikipedia.

1. To improve the user experience on the Wikipedia.org portal site, to use the portal page as a jumping off point: enabling the visitor to do something. Enter a search term/phrase to find fascinating content, or click on a language link or even go to one of our sister wiki sites - but to go somewhere and discover interesting things.

2. We want to deliver relevant content that could include: localized language treatment, trending articles and recommending of interesting articles.

3. We want to have a more mobile centric view of the portal - to ensure everyone has a great experience, even if they're on a low bandwidth connection.

Production Release Goals

Q3 2015/2016

1. Updating article statistics

Our goal is to manually update the article stats on a regular and frequent basis until we can automate the process

2. Update search box to be more prominent and contain meta data and images (as available) with type-ahead

3. A/B test to detect visitor's browser's preferred language(s)

Re-arrange the links around the globe
Localize the phrase "The Free Encyclopedia" under the Wikipedia header (allowing for more white space in the links around the globe image).

Q4 2015/2016

1. As a visitor, I want to have a more streamlined display - by moving the search box into a more prominent position.

Perform an A/B test to remove or otherwise minimize the globe image and move a more prominent and enhanced search box to the top of the page.

2. As a visitor, I want an even more minimalist display by collapsing all language links into a selector tool and removing article counts.

Perform an A/B test to collapse all language links into a Universal Language Selector.

3. As a visitor, I want to have dynamic and interesting content that will provide me with a reason to view the portal page on a daily basis.

Create a set of portal test pages (draft name: Portal Labs pages) where we can showcase innovative ideas for the Portal and encourage community feedback
- Create a test page that will have trending or recommended articles that are localized to my preferred language.
- Create a test page that will encourage visitors to clickthough to our sister sites by displaying the picture of the day or having an action to show a random article from a pre-set category.

4. Complete a production release to the Wikipedia.org Portal of least one of the above 3 tests/test pages.

2016/2017

1. To find out why visitors come to the portal - what are they looking for and what are they hoping to find?

2. To find out why so many of our visitors leave the portal without searching or finding interesting content.

3. Figuring out a way to help both sets of visitors find great content on any of our wiki sites.

What's Next? (Additional details of our goals)

1. Visually enhance our visitor's Portal page experience - our ideas include:

Localization of the entire portal page, based on the visitor's preferred language
Update mobile version of page to be more in accordance with good Google practices for spacing, etc
Add "Search" as localized ghost text in search box
Language selection as a dropdown for all languages while supporting non-JavaScript usage
Keep all text/images "above the fold" for desktop visitors
Localize "the free encyclopedia" phrase
Recommend localized trending articles
Recommend random, localized but interesting articles

2. Promote community interaction

Create a Portal Labs site
- Display interactive and fully functional cutting edge ideas for the Wikipedia.org Portal page
- Community can view and give feedback (thumbs up, thumbs down, text comments)

3. Automate the article statistics updates for the portal and sister wiki sites

4. Investigate right to left page orientation

History of the Wikipedia.org Portal, from the beginning: experiments and improvement ideas

How have we gone about finding out about our visitors and how they use the Portal?

Do an initial analysis (April 2015)
Set up a dashboard that is specific to Portal Traffic (December 2015)
Run a test to determine if users are presented with meta data and images while they search - does that create a higher clickthrough rate? (Answer: yes)
Find out the percentages of traffic to the portal by browser, device and country and if their browsers can support JavaScript (February 2016)
Create an archive of A/B tests that have been run so that we can review our previous testing
Up next: run a test to assess if we can determine the browser's preferred language and display that language link in the topmost left language link (Phab ticket)

What have we learned?

As of February 28, 2016, based on a total page views of: 14.61 Million, we note that:

Overall, our portal visitors browser's support usage of JavaScript is at 93%:
* United States: 96%
* All other countries: 86.5%

Search Engines do drive traffic to the portal, but, 98.52% of our traffic to the portal is not referred by a search engine. Average referrals come from these engines:
* Google: 79.35%
* Bing: 11.94%
* Yahoo: 5.62%
* Baidu: 2.87%
* Yandex: 0.22%

Our visitors do one of the following:	Percentage
No action taken (abandoned)	48.61%
Click into the search box	39.11%
Clickthrough success rate	32.81%
Click on one of the primary language links	11.47%
Click on one of the secondary language links	0.47%
Click on one of the links to a sister Wiki's	0.36%
Click on the find a language box (broken)	0.11%

Desktop Browser Usage	Percentage	Mobile Browser Usage	Percentage
Firefox	15.71%	Chrome Mobile (Android)	10.6%
IE	9.69%	Chrome Mobile (iOS)	0.53%
Chrome	23.18%	IE Mobile	1.01%
Safari	7.82%	Opera Mobile	0.54%
MS Edge	1.69%	Safari Mobile	11.58%

Visitors are from	Percentage
Australia	1.34%
Canada	3.73%
China	1.2%
France	1.3%
Germany	3.92%
India	2.26%
All other countries	43.3%
Philippines	0.87%
Russia	2.58%
United Kingdom	7.37%
United States	32.13%