- Dec 16: Consumer Tools Team
- Dec 17: Traffic Team
- Dec 18: N&Rs Team
- Dec 19: UGC Team
- Dec 20: UXFCP Team
For the last time in 2024 ... Eyo, lovelies!! Welcome to not only our last "Product Wrapped" blog but also our last blog of the year 2024 in general! Starting on Monday, each Product Support member has been releasing a blog to recap what the team they've been supporting has managed to release this year. Héctor kicked things off on Monday for the Consumer Tools team, followed by Jenny for the Traffic Team, and Dylan for News & Ratings. Yesterday, I released my first blog for the UGC team, and today I will wrap up our Wrapped with the recap for the User-Experience Team, aka UXFCP!
A big theme for the UXFCP team has been "decluttering" the user experience. Before I delve into how we're starting to tackle that problem, let me first stop to acknowledge that we know there is a problem. We are all aware that the mobile and desktop experiences have grown bloated over time by all teams having added their own things to it. This combined experience makes it harder for users to achieve what they're here to do: find the information about their passion project.
So that's where the UXFCP team started: reorganizing the content presentation in such a way that we can have a better balance between "fan created elements" aka the content on the page, "Fandom widgets" aka attempts to help users to find their next thing to deep dive on, and "ads". I don't think the last needs more explanation beyond "it's a necessary evil", but we do need to stay vigilant that it doesn't spread too far. I also have to note that the UXFCP team started with a special attention for the logged-out user experience.
As the adage goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day", so will the decluttering solution also take time. It won't be just one thing that gets us there, it'll be the sum of many smaller things over time. That's why the UXFCP team spent the better part of the year experimenting first before moving to productization. Let me walk you through the four most notable releases of this year that helped move the needle on decluttering our user experience!
Notification Center For Anonymous Users on FandomMobile[]
Mobile readers make up the bulk of our traffic these days, though the screen on which they're consuming the content is small and thus every inch counts. In order to make room for more wiki content to be immediately available, ever since October anonymous users also see a bell icon in the nav bar on mobile, just like logged in users. While they cannot receive notifications like other users, this bell notification drawer will hold the site notice and marketing surveys. By moving these notices out of the way, we cleared up some of their browsing experience, which resulted in more engagement with the site.
Mobile Drawer For Anonymous Users[]
Released in November, the mobile drawer is a container at the bottom of the screen intended to house widgets and other Fandom offerings outside of the article content. It's only visible to logged-out users, though next year we may start looking at how this feature can also enhance the logged-in experience. Right now the drawer only holds two types of widgets, the "Popular Pages" and "Just For You" widgets. The feature is successfully converting those "one and done" users (folks who only see 1 page in a session and then bounce) to at least "two or more". This also allowed us to remove the "Others Like You Viewed" widget from within the content area, as it was the same as the "Just For You" one.
[]
Without a doubt the most visible release of the year, the release of the horizontal navigation with content panels in December didn't pass anyone by unnoticed. This change was mainly the result of a successful experiment back in October, where the UXFCP team tried to find that golden spot to put the "desktop drawer", the – you guessed it – desktop equivalent of the mobile drawer with the same goal in mind: find a place where the "what's next" widgets could be put so they're out of the way but still engaging. The answer was "in the left navigation". This required lots of reshuffling, but the new place and cleaned up left navigation bar opens up the door for more experimentation with more engaging content models that can be put in that left navigation as well!
FanFeed Removal on Desktop[]
This coincided with the release of the new navigation but was actually the result of the rerunning of an old experiment. For those unfamiliar with the term, "FanFeed" referred to the collection of cards one could find at the bottom of pages on both desktop and mobile. The engagement value of this feature was tested by the experiment, and we discovered that on desktop, these cards mainly got in the way of having a clean experience. As such, we removed them on all desktop pages while keeping them around on mobile. If you are missing the suggestions these offered, you can find a smaller selection of these in the "Others Like You Viewed" widget within the new "Current" panel on the left navigation bar.
Looking Ahead to 2025[]
Earlier this year we also asked some of our users what they thought about the experiments the UXFCP team ran this year. While people weren't necessarily against the experiments themselves, the team learned that users did lack a clear overview of where we wanted to go with all these different pieces of the puzzle. As such, we'll now already say that for next year, we want to continue down the same road we started this year: relocate and declutter!
With the mobile and desktop drawers now released, we can start next year with a fresh batch of experiments to find more content elements to add to either feature in order to make it more engaging to users and continue to declutter the current experience.
With that, I have arrived at the last blog post paragraph of 2024. I shall keep this short and sweet. Thank you so much to the UXFCP team for all their efforts and a big thank you to all of you, the users, for continuing to work with us by sharing your feedback and creating the best platform this can be! I hope that 2025 may bring us more adventures together. Happy holidays, everyone, and happy editing!
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