Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Portal retrospective 2016-07-07

Format

This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.

Action Items from last month

• Chris: Update the "Project portals" page on Meta (task T136163)
  •  Done (enough)
• Deb: create rough mocks of some of the ideas for the future work and add to page on wiki for further discussion
  •  Done (search results)
• Deb: send email(s) on production releases and upcoming A/B tests
  •  Done (so far--more to come)
• Kevin: Will continue to suggest A/B test retros at times
  • There didn't seem to be opportunities this past month; no tests scheduled, so moot
• Kevin: Try to resolve code review delays
  • Kevin will continue to work on this
• Kevin: Schedule one hour for next month's retro, since a half hour was too short
  •  Done

What happened since the last retro (June 6)

• We're getting a new analyst! (Partially Portal related)
• Qualtrics survey on "how you arrived on the portal" launched and wrapped up
• Asked community about adding mobile app badges to the portal page (lots of feedback and the issue has been shelved for a few weeks)
• Wikimania
• "Portal offsite" in Poland
• Wrote documentation about portal development process and guide to contributing
• and thus: got some community contributions to the portal
• Added USA regions to dashboard analytics
• Got the ball rolling on getting portal text into translatewiki.net
• Added first visit clickthroughs to the dashboard
• production releases of legal links, readmes, etc for portal
• Jan at Design offsite in SF

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

• Wikimania and (small) team offsite in Warsaw
  • face-to-face time Deb/Jan was very helpful
• Data results from last A/B test for language dropdown (collapsing lang by article count)
• Help from Chris on navigating community talks dealing with portal
• Volunteer contributions to portal page ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/WPOR/history/master/ )
• got the ops/script blocking task fixed for updating portal stats

Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know about the last month

• people are interested in the portal and everyone has an opinion +1 +1

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

• There's apparently a sustained spike in no-actions and a drop in searches (visible on dashboard)
  • Ticket is open to investigate: task T139109
• Jan feeling the need to +2 own code a couple of times.
  • and community pushback for doing so
  • we should have a discussion about our team norms, constraints, etc.
  • Small changes usually can get someone to +2; large visual (javascript) changes are harder to get someone
  • Julien is the only other Discovery person well-qualified to review
  • Distinction between visual (html/css) and tricky code (javascript)--or both in the same commit
  • Distinction between "does it work" vs. "is this the best technical approach" vs. "is this the right UX"
• something about the communities response with the app badges - frustrating
• asking the community about adding mobile app download badges to portal page (pushback from internal to WMF and external)

Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other

• Deb did (and continues to do!) a great job multi-managing teams while Dan was away
• Jan always super helpful and seemingly glad to help +1+1
• Talking with community members and other WMF'ers, chapters during wikimania
  • everyone wanted to know what the Discovery team was doing (or suggest things we should be doing)
  • Lots of goodwill from those conversations
  • We should do more in-person outreach (e.g. conferences)

Pinky: A little thing (good or bad) that would be easy to overlook

• Translation setup for incorporating new words into portal (for sister project descriptive text) from community
  • Lots of collaboration between different teams; quite a bit of work
  • Splitting the translatable text out was slightly challenging, and then gluing them back together
  • Jan learned quite a bit about translations and localizations
• Translating our (major) communications should be more common (this is on me - CK)
  • Takes effort, and also takes time (like a week). Need to account for that when planning.
  • What are people requesting to be translated? Targeted comms, such as mobile badges and question marks

Action items

• Deb: send out email RfC for language dropdown and chat up the new updated page design
  • if all goes well, push it into production in next few weeks
• Kevin: Carry idea of a/b test retros over to the search team
• Kevin: Continue to work on timely code reviews
• Chris: Communicate that after we wrap up a few things on the portal that we'll take a bit of a less active role on the portal for a while (focus on accomplishments so far)
• Mikhail: provide some data (ticket has already been created)