Eyo people! As you may know already, over the past months, the User Experience Team has been experimenting with a mobile and desktop drawer. If neither of these terms ring any bells, feel free to check out past experiment announcements for these: Mobile Drawer, Mobile Drawer Variations, Mobile Drawer - Persistent User Setting, Desktop Drawer, and Desktop Drawer V2 and Mobile Drawer V1 Validation.

In short, these experiments are aimed to find that golden spot where widgets, such as "Others Like You Also Viewed" and "Popular Pages", can be shown to logged-out users to entice them to continue their exploration of Fandom pages without being too intrusive to those not needing the help.

Today's experiment announcement continues that goal for logged-out desktop users.

Experiment Details[]

• Experiment Name: Left Content Panel

• Test Launch: Thursday, October 24th

• Duration: At least 1 week

• Will Be Tested On: Logged-out users on English wikis using desktop with a screen that's 1640px or bigger and are viewing a content page
  • Are Excluded: Users viewing pages from the United States of America, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, and Mexico
  • Are Also Excluded: Wikis that have a default wide width setting

• Hypothesis: The project aims to design a subtle content recommendation feature to encourage users who typically only view one page to explore more content. This feature should integrate into the user experience without disrupting users who already view multiple pages. The goal is to enhance engagement and facilitate natural exploration. Additionally, this experiment will help determine if this is an effective location for such a feature.

• Other Notes: Like many other experiments, we'll be running various versions at the same time, so not only see if the location makes sense to people, but also if the order of the widgets in the panel makes a difference to engagement. There will be a control group and 5 variants.

Variant 1 - 1920x1200 resolution

Variant 2 - 1920x1200 resolution

Variant 3 - 1920x1200 resolution

Variant 4 - 1920x1200 resolution

Variant 5 - 1920x1200 resolution

As you can see, this experiment is dependent on another experiment we ran earlier this year: the horizontal navigation. Read more about the Top Nav Bar experiment

Giving Qualitative Feedback[]

We always welcome and appreciate our users taking the time to give us their actionable feedback, and this time is no different. Experiments naturally work with a randomly selected target group to make the data trustworthy. However, that often hinders people's ability to give feedback on something, and while we can learn a lot from data, receiving direct reasoning from people why they do or do not like something is also extremely valuable to us to move forward. So when leaving feedback, please be as detailed as possible.

To that end, we have been including screenshots of how experiments look in these blogs so everyone can see what things look like. These naturally only give you a static view of this, so for the first time, we also invite everyone who is not located in one of the excluded countries and has a screen larger than 1640px to log out and head over to a content page on the Fandom Stars Wiki where you can check out this left content panel for yourself and explore the wiki further to see how the panel behaves.

When you do, please return here afterwards and let us know what you think, as your feedback matters! We're especially interested to know what content you would like to see here if you are not interested in seeing the widgets. You can very well make a distinction between what should be shown to logged-out readers and what's there for logged-in users. Thank you and happy editing everyone!

Lostris

Fandom Staff

Lostris is a Senior Product Support Manager. When not online, she lives to travel, play roller derby, and escape the world by watching anything that has a good plot, good acting, and preferably a ton of sassy one-liners.

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