Welcome to the latest wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s happening for April 28th:
What’s happening?This month we have a bunch of tests that will be running on a small number of articles, like:
Moving the references section higher up on the page, immediately under the steps. The idea here is that moving references to a more visible area of the page will help show readers (and search engines) that articles are well-researched.
Moving the video section to the top of the page after the introduction. Here we’re working on gauging what the reader’s intent might be: would they potentially prefer to watch a video before reading the steps?
Shortening the tips section. This experiment will show three tips in the section, and then have a “see more” option to expand the section.
Changing the section headers for Q&A and Sections articles. The goal here is to consolidate the icons and designs in headings into one universal design for consistency. This will test using “Question 1” and “Section 1” to go along with “Part 1” and “Method 1”.
Tweaking category pages. We’re going to test highlighting related topics in that category. We think if readers are on a particular category page, they may be interested in filtering their search and finding other articles that are closely related to their interests.
Half-height images. We’re going to test articles with smaller images to see if being able to access more of the written content faster is helpful for readers.
WRM title experiment. You may notice some new URLs being created by WRM that don’t seem 100% correct. It may be that the title has a grammatical error, or the wording is a little unusual. This is because new titles being written by WRM are currently being created based on the exact phrasing that readers are searching for. This experiment is part of the testing being done to find out whether using specific wording in articles helps readers find wikiHow.
However, all of these articles will
get custom titles that are grammatically correct, so although I know it may be hard to not correct them, at this stage, we don’t want to change or move the original URL. This way the team can track data on these titles and see whether it’s something that we want to continue.
Now that’s a lot of experiments! Do you have any ideas for tests we could try? Feel free to let us know below if you have any thoughts!
