Every designer should read this UX case study

Exploring the unique challenges of making changes within an open-source, volunteer-led environment. Plus, the importance of prototyping.

Wikipedia is more than a website — it’s perhaps a cornerstone of the World Wide Web. For decades, the site has provided a model for collaborating online, designing long-form content layouts, and supporting internationalization.

Stuff UX designer Alex Hollender explains how the Readers Web Team at the Wikimedia Foundation developed the Wikipedia redesign project and successfully pulled this enormous scope of work as a team, improving millions of people's reading and discovering knowledge experience.

The team began the project in April 2020 and launched in January 2023. You will find great insights into designing for a global audience (300+ languages, every device imaginable), designing for a large audience (~10 billion monthly pageviews), co-designing products (socio-technical processes) with an active community of users, editors, & technical contributors, and designing around user-generated content.

Their goals were:

• Make the website familiar & welcoming to anyone who visits (thinking especially about younger people in other parts of the world who have not yet discovered Wikipedia)
• Improve the experience of reading, navigating long articles, and knowledge discovery
• Better accommodate divergent needs (reading vs. editing)
• Develop a more flexible interface with an eye toward future features

They picked these key metrics to monitor:

• Pageviews
• Edit rates
• Account creation
• Session length

Business results/data:

• 45% increased use of Table of Contents
• 29% increased use of Search
• Preferred by 87% of logged-in users
• 15% decrease in "navigational scrolling" to find tools, menu items, etc.

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