Wikimedia Research/Design Research/Reading Team UX Research/Text Size Changer

Research questions: Are users able to change Wikipedia article text size on the iOS app? Is the experience easy to discover and use?

Participants: 6 under 55, 6 over 55. Half in each group were male, half female.

Protocol/Tasks:

• Search for the article for “Vampire.”
• Scroll down to view the section about “Folk Beliefs.” Read a bit about this topic.
• You now wish that the text was larger because you forgot your glasses. How would you solve this problem? Take a minute or two on this, then go on to the next task.
• If you found a way to change the text size, skip ahead to the next task. If you didn’t find it yet, try tapping the TT icon at the bottom of the screen (second icon from the left).
• How would you describe your experience changing the text size for this article?
• You remembered where you put your glasses, and are now wearing them!  Now go to the article for “Wombat” and make the text size smaller.
• Now, go to the main Explore page. Oops, your glasses fell off your face and are now broken. :( How would you now change the text size to be larger? Take a minute or two on this, then go on to the next task.
• Right now there’s no way to change the text size for the Explore page in the app, so this was sort of a trick question! Thank you for showing us how you might solve for that problem.
• Have you ever had issues reading Wikipedia articles on your phone?
• If this feature were available on the Wikipedia app, how would that affect your use of Wikipedia?

Outcome/answer:

100% of participants are successful in their attempts to solve the problem of resizing text in Wikipedia articles on the iOS app. The text size changer icon was simple to notice and access and the slider method was straightforward and usable.