FANDOM Staff Blog

Yesterday, I posted a blog announcing design changes to the Popular Pages & Recent Images widgets. We received the results for the Other Like You experiment and have turned the design change live to all users.

Tweak: Unification of Others Like You
Launching: Today!
Premise: We are unifying the designs of these widgets - instead of having similar but different designs, they will have the same design with differing content depending on the widget.
Data: Similarly to the other Unification of experiments, we did not see a massive pageview increase (we saw a slight one, though!), but that is okay because it was not our goal. However, unlike the other two experiments, we tested multiple variants - one with the new design, and one with the new design…

Last month, I announced an experiment we were running to unify the widgets designs for the Popular Pages and Recent Images widgets. As I mentioned in the blog, this is part of our broader effort to make Fandom widgets more visually consistent.

The experiment is complete, and I'm back to announce the rollout!

Tweak: Unification of Popular Pages & Recent Images widget designs
Launching: The new design for Popular Pages went live last week, and the new design for Recent Images will go live this week.
Premise: We are unifying the designs of these widgets - instead of having similar but different designs, they will have the same design with differing content depending on the widget.
Data: In some experiments, our primary goal isn't always to increas…

Hello everyone!

While we’re currently running the third iteration of the experiment to track progress in maps, I’m here to announce another planned enhancement to this interactive feature for every community. Since the end of March, we already announced we were working in parallel, to both experiment with features like progress tracking, but also adding native enhancements to the Interactive Maps tool and for all the communities. The first one was the option to use the full screen to display a map, and we’re currently starting to test how we can embed maps on pages in different ways.

Project Name: New Ways to Embed Interactive Maps on Pages

Test Launch: June (Tentative) *

Type: Early Testing with Voluntary Communities

Will Be Tested On: All logged…

Hi all!

You're hearing a lot from me this week, but hopefully that is a good thing! Today, I am announcing a change we are making to Quizzes. Please look below!

Tweak: Quizzes will be shown on Discussions, Articles, on both

Launching: June 13, 2024

Premise: Previously, Quizzes could only be either enabled and displayed in both Articles and Discussions, or completely disabled for the entire wiki. However, we received feedback from various communities requesting the option to show Quizzes only in Discussions and not in Articles. In response, we have now implemented the ability to enable Quizzes exclusively in Discussions, exclusively in Articles, in both, or to disable them entirely.

If you would like to see this change on your wiki, please either c…

Hello!

The UX team is continued to work on unifying designs for right rail widgets, & this time we've tackled the Others Like You Also Viewed module!

Experiment Name: Unification of Others Like You Also Viewed
Test Launch: Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Test Closes: One Week
Will Be Tested On: 3% of logged out users on desktop
Hypothesis: We believe that creating a single Fandom-ized design for widgets in the right rail will lead to a better user experience. We believe that users will be more interested in visiting others pages if the widgets are branded in a single, Fandom-like style. We began this with design changes to the Recent Images & Popular Pages widgets, and we are continuing here.
Other Notes: We are running two variants - one with the new d…

Hello again!

We have a mobile-based experiment coming through the pipeline this week!

Experiment Name: Mobile Drawer
Test Launch: Thursday, June 6, 2024
Test Closes: 1-2 weeks
Will Be Tested On: 6% of logged out users
Hypothesis: We believe that creating a Mobile Drawer to house widgets and other Fandom offerings outside of the article content will allow fans to either engage or not in a way that is both comfortable and useful for them.
Other Notes: The drawer will expand after the logged out user scrolls past the first paragraph and can be collapsed by clicking the arrow on the right. We are running two variants - one where the mobile drawer will not deploy if the video ad is active, & the other where primary video ads on top are suppressed.
Prel…

Hello everyone!

We are already in June, and this is my fourth blog post (originally published) on the Fandom Stars Wiki, talking about our recent experiments and implementations. Some of my recent updates have been about the current experiment on gaming wikis with maps to use a feature for progress tracking. Now I would like to explain a bit more about our next plans.

On June 10, we are launching the third iteration of our experiment, releasing multiple design variants of our feature interface. Before moving on to the next details, for people who are not familiar with the experiment, you can see the initial details we shared on March 8, and also the second iteration we announced on April 12.

Experiment Name: Progress tracking in Maps 3

Test Lau…

Hi all!

We have two new experiments we will begin running this week!

Experiment Name: ToC Collapse, Read More
Test Launch: Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Test Closes: One Week
Will Be Tested On: 3% of logged out users
Hypothesis: We believe that improving the ToC will provide an environment that supports fans being able to find the content they desire more rapidly. We believe that this speed will translate to them not being frustrated and invite them to spend more time with us exploring the site.
Other Notes: We are releasing a few variants of this experiment, which will include having the ToC collapsed upon the initial page load with the option to expand it if needed as well as the ToC partially collapsed with an option to expand if needed.
Preliminary …

Hello everyone!

Since almost 3 months ago, we've been experimenting with Interactive Maps, adding a feature to track your IRL game progress using markers. You can read all the details about the release of the first iteration on March 4 here, but also extended details about the release of the second iteration here.

One of the previous limitations we had for the initial release was the storage of your progress data, using for these last weeks a local storage in each user browser.

We are glad to announce that, starting next Monday May 27, we’re starting to save your progress tracking in our database, using your Fandom account. This change would avoid losing your previous progress, if for instance you cleaned your data saved in your browser, or ad…

Hi all!

We are releasing a new update next week!

Tweak: Fan Feed will be removed from article pages with less than 200 words of content on desktop
Launching: April 15
Premise: Earlier this year, we experimented with the idea of removing the Fan Feed. Our hypothesis was that users would stay on an article for a longer time without the distraction of the Fan Feed. We tested different variations, like removing it completely, removing it from long pages, and removing it from short pages. We found that removing the Fan Feed from long pages or removing it all together actually caused a drop in engagement, while removing it from short pages increased page views.
Data: In the experiment mentioned above, we saw a .12% increase in PVs on short pages.

…