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Welcome to the latest wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s happening for Jan 20th:

:rocket: What’s happening?Containerless design for small screens. This has just gone live on 1000 articles today! With containerless design, images take up the whole width of the screen, and there’s no grey background. This design is making steps towards modernizing the layout without changing too much at once. The team will monitor engagement and traffic to make sure that it’s beneficial, and if things are stable then they’ll move forward with implementing it across all articles on small screens.

We’d love your help with this!Would you be interested in helping the team test and check for any issues that might be showing up? We have created a spreadsheet with the 1000 articles and would love it if you could help test out a few of them. I have popped all the details in this separate post: Containerless Design Project: Can you help?

:rocket: New experiment:Subheadings. On some articles in tech categories, you may see an italicized subheading under the article title. You can see an example of this on: 7 Ways to Disable Circle By Disney Parental Controls - wikiHow Tech where it says “A simple guide to disable parental controls on Circle by Disney”. Having an H2 like this can be helpful for search engines to find our articles. The team will be keeping an eye on the data as it comes in to see if this seems to be a helpful addition to articles.

:rocket: New experiment:TOC tweaks. The team will also be testing out a different table of contents on some tech articles, where the links will be left-aligned directly underneath the introduction. The team is interested to see if it helps readers get to their section quicker, especially on tech articles where often only one method is pertinent to them. You can see a mock-up of this here . Do you prefer this one or the existing one? Which one do you think a wikiHow reader who isn’t familiar with our layout would find easiest to follow? Or do you have other suggestions?

:rocket: What’s happening?Testing out a new magic word: _ SECTIONS _ This magic word formats the article somewhat like QAM, but hides step numbers if a section only has 1 step. It also has the ability for someone to add this tag: {{sa_no_numbers:}} to a section heading to leave out all of the step numbers in a section. Additionally, on small/mobile the headers will read “Section 1 of 2” instead of “Question 1 of 2”. You can see this in action on: https://www.wikihow.com/Ask-for-a-Sick-Day-over-Text
 Do you think readers will like this style? Do you have any thoughts for tweaks or other formats that could be interesting to try?

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I like all of these.

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Me too!:open_mouth:

The _ SECTION _ seems interesting:slight_smile:

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The changes look neat. The TOC tweak is a bright new addition. The improvisation hat on the staff is churning quite a few hit ideas, every week:blue_heart:

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These look interesting!

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Nice! Here’s just something I’d like to say:

Containerless design for small screens:Frankly, I think I liked the regular design more (the one where images don’t take up the whole width of the screen and there is grey background). I don’t mean I dislike the containerless design, but I liked the regular design better. Either way, I know the team’s trying to increase engagement and traffic, which I really appreciate.

Subheadings:I love this one! I hope this experiment will be successful, and I’ll look forward to seeing this on more articles:slight_smile:

TOC tweaks:To be honest, I’d prefer the existing one. I can’t speak for a reader who isn’t familiar with our layout – but if I’m speaking for myself, I’d find the current layout the best. That’s because from what I see in the mock-up – I guess there’d be significant whitespace on the right of the Table of Contents, something that wouldn’t look appealing to me.

Testing out a new magic word:I thought even QAM hid step numbers if a question only has one step, isn’t it? For example, on How to Fight Climate Change if You Have Pets (which is a QAM), the first, second, third, fifth and sixth questions only have one step, but it still hides step numbers on 1-step-questions.
Also, I’ve noticed the SECTIONS tag makes it “Sections” on the Table of Contents, online “In this article” as with QAM. So other than this, being able to add the {{sa_no_numbers:}} tag, and the headers reading “Section 1 of 2” instead of “Question 1 of 2” on small screens, it’s basically the same as QAM, right?
And can we, community members, create SECTIONS articles, too? And do the QAM Guidelines mostly apply to SECTIONS as well? I’m curious!:slight_smile:

Okay, and just a tiny tweak – it’s “SECTIONS”, “SECTION” doesn’t make it work:wink:

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Thanks for all of your feedback on these ideas and experiments!

@Buterflie nice catch with the extra s in the magic word! Correct, it also adds “section” instead of part/method/question etc. For now, I’d recommend we wait about a month to see if it is something that’s going to continue, and then we can go from there with community articles. I think QAM guidelines will likely be similar, but let’s get a feel for them as more come out in the wild!

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Sorry for the bump, but is there anything cooking this week?

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Hiya @SkiC - great question! These wikiHaus Lab updates aren’t weekly like the Achievements Posts. There are either 2, 3, or 4 weeks in between each one - just depending on what’s going on:slight_smile:

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A couple of things I want to check in on:

  • What’s the current status of the “add to collection” feature? Are there any plans to add the feature, and if so, what’s the estimated time it’ll go live?
  • What’s the status of the liking and commenting feature? I missed a lot of the wikiHaus Lab updates on that, so is the like number arbitrary right now and about when will the comments feature go live?
  • What’s the status of the transcript downloading feature for wikiHow tech help pro videos?
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Great questions @FlowerPower555 . I’ll see if I can get some updates on these for the next post!

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