Humaniki December and January Update: Design Challenges and Pre-alpha Release

From the team at Humaniki, we wish you a happy, inclusive, and equitable new year!

Humaniki, is a merger of two previous Wikimedia projects Wikidata Human Gender Indicators (WHGI) and Denelezh, providing statistics about the content gender gap in Wikimedia projects. 

In the third and fourth months of the Humaniki project development phase, we transitioned from generative research to designing and testing the new tool. We made progress in 1) delivering final UI designs by evaluating the website prototype with diversity-focussed editors, and 2) making the pre-production alpha version publicly available for testing by integrating the front-end and data API engineering work.

Design

As we describe in our November update, based on our user research, the most requested features for Humaniki relate to making it more shareable, more searchable, and more reusable that helped guide our design decisions. We came up with a list of the top 5 features that we were going to implement during the grant timeline, but we further narrow our focus on the three core features listed below to retain the functionality and maintain a seamless experience for existing users.

• Publication ready presentation with easy to export visualization images to help create awareness.
• Customizable visualizations to enable data exploration.
• Highlight information gaps in Wikidata, the primary source of open data for Humaniki, to maintain transparency.

We faced some challenges while designing for a diverse user base with different needs. To tackle these, we brought data and engineering perspectives together by organizing group ideation exercises. One of the challenges was the occurrence of information overload when viewing data tables pertaining to gender representation of all 19 gender identities in-use on Wikidata. To address this, we provide a hide/collapse view wherein we display men, women metrics along with the cumulative metrics of all other genders in the default view. Users can expand this view to get a further breakdown of metrics for all other gender identities. This update allows us to expose content progressively and maintain seamless interaction while being inclusive of all gender groups (you can watch this interaction in the demo video provided below).

We evaluated our designs using moderated usability testing with our target users. We conducted testing with 6 community members – three English Wikipedia editors and three non-English Wikipedia editors who are proficient in English. Based on the insights gathered from the testing sessions, we updated the designs and delivered a prototype using the Figma prototyping tool.

Demo Video (Prototype)

Technical Updates

The engineering team has been working towards a public alpha release that contains a subset of features but should be mostly architecturally complete. For our first feature list, we settled to include three interactive visualizations (gender by date of birth, wikiproject language, and citizenship) along with our explore/search interface. A version of the site is already available for selected users for testing, and if you would like to provide inputs, please take the feedback survey below. We continue to work towards continuously updated data, full user interactivity, and filtering in January and hope to have the alpha fully launched in Q1 2021.

Feedback Survey