Hey everyone,
Stars celebrated two wonderful years of the Fandom Stars program and the many contributions made to the platform through constructive feedback and experience. The week-long celebration brought joy and insight, but I wanted to take this moment to summarize two important Discord Roundtable events that allowed Stars to share their expertise regarding their experience with editors and present opportunities for Stars and Fandom’s Product team to collaborate as we reach our North Star together.
Product Roundtable with Fandom’s Newest Product Manager, John Hart[]
John was eager to engage with the community and learn more about their needs and preferences for editing tools and the quality of data editors would like in the future. He was interested in hearing about the challenges Fandom Stars faced at every level of the editor journey to understand where he and his team could make improvements within the editor specifically. He presented Stars with two simple questions, “Can you walk me through your editing experience and describe what challenges you are facing?” and “Would you like the opportunity to gather more data and analytics?” the hour-long conversation flowed effortlessly. Each piece of feedback encouraged John to ask more personalized questions to Stars to understand what editors were specifically doing and how their experience could be optimized. Check out a few of the responses Stars provided that could potentially be helpful or things they would like to see listed below:
- Mostly what I've been doing on The Vampire Diaries is file management and updating our naming convention of like 10K+ images, deleting and uploading, etc. But I'm mostly using dev scripts and my bot account to facilitate renames and deletions.
- When I'm actively working, it's usually about 6-8 episodes worth or screencaps at a time, so maybe 700-1000 uploads, renaming probably around 100 promo images for the episodes and deleting hundreds that are through the wiki (as a replacement, either poorly/wrongly named, poor quality image, etc)--this is usually removing them from articles, letting them pool in the unused and then delete; however, it gets tricky if they're used on user pages.
- One thing that I can think of as an editor that would be really helpful for me is the ability to preview how something will look on mobile before committing an edit. I know that we can switch to a mobile view on desktop, but that also changes the editor interface to the mobile one, which isn't easy to use on desktop. If there was some sort of popover that could show what the preview would look like on mobile - something like "Responsive Design Mode" in Firefox's developer tools - that would be so helpful to me as an editor.
- A big thing we run into is a lot of people making a first edit and then never coming back. It’d be great if we could find out why and how to increase that number of editors who stay. Obviously, new editors is a good metric - but it doesn’t do communities themselves much good if it’s just once and done
- It would be nice to see things like are people actually using disambiguation links? Are people searching for stuff that we don’t have?
- Also, regarding analytics for gadgets, I think that report may be broken. Our gadget usage report never shows any data, but I know I am using a gadget, so at least one person should show up there!
- Yes please on more data. I’d love to see if there’s a large pattern of a user going from one page to another during like a new release
- Fandom's various mechanisms like Admin Dashboard or S:Community (or Right Rail) that just screams for more customization, but they have to be tampered with custom CSS
- Some Fandom's mechanisms feel to be added on top of each other and doesn't feel like software communicates with itself internally
- Also, some mechanisms feel abandoned even if the ideas behind them are really great for engagement like S:Community and Achievements
Fandom Stars Anniversary Roundtable with Fandom’s Chief Product Officer, Peter Mansour[]
To complete the celebration of Fandom Stars Week, Stars engaged in another roundtable conversation with Peter Mansour as Stars took the time to review Brandon’s Community Connect recap blog that details how Fandom is using engagement to improve user experience and presented a series of questions supporting clear and actionable feedback. The goal of this conversation was to give Stars an understanding of how Fandom’s Product team operates and why these initiatives are important. As Fandom Stars it is important to understand their purpose and feel empowered to provide constructive feedback.
1. Wikis want people to stay on their wiki, Fandom wants people to explore the whole of Fandom. How can these two things be reconciled in a way that makes both sides happy?
Peter: Well part of it is wanting to show fans what it is they are looking for. And that is our shared goal. The fact is if we are offering good content and valuable content, users engage. We don't want to get them off your wiki. We want to show them the information that they are looking for. That is what you want too. So our overall goal is actually to empower you to do that as well as help the end user.
2. When you first looked over the Fandom platform, what three things did you want to see changed and how? Have you been able to take action on any of them?
Peter: This has been one of my most difficult jobs. And trust me I've had some tough ones. Part of the problem is that the user experience hadn't been a priority for far too long. Being able to present information in a way that's easy to consume, easy to create for the creators, and modernized would take a lot of infrastructure work as well as just simple user experience work.
3. How can the lived experience of editors be better incorporated into the product team's future decision-making?
Peter: That is when the light bulb went on to me that we really didn't have the muscle of connecting to our creators. That's why Tim's team was created. So, to the question of what we're doing to get creator feedback we now have a team dedicated to a back-and-forth conversation. And I would say it's working great. And I would really like to thank Tim for the work that he's done connecting with all of you. Because we need to work with you. You need to feel like this is collaborative instead of things happening to you. And when things are just rolling out, it's difficult to tell the difference.
Within a Fandom Stars Roundtable, we find a unique way to have tough conversations about things that impact the community and work through them. Peter was transparent about the challenges he was excited to improve for the community, including ads. Peter mentioned,” I will say it is my intention to create safe spaces where ads could live. This should help you and us. For us, it helps viewability. For you, it keeps us out of your way. And it's a battle I am dealing with on a daily basis. I talk a lot about creating value to our team. And most of the value was created this year has not taken adding any more ads. You will see us move stuff around. The designers are brainstorming ways of creating places to put ads if they had an empty page. But this is a Titanic we have here, folks. It's been moving in a certain direction for a long time and I just got here. It'll take a while. But you should start seeing changes.”
Finally, we turned the tables toward the end of the event and Peter had some questions for Fandom Stars about video. We’re not talking about creating TikTok videos or social videos, but adding to the content that is created on your wiki. Stars were open to having the conversation as they ultimately relied on text and imagery, but the collaborative group appreciated conversation and exploration and discussed examples where video could be necessary.
We enjoy hearing from Stars and learning about their experiences and points of view. Staff often leaves discussions feeling transformed with new takeaways and a fresh outlook thanks to the impact of the community, and we invite anyone who found this summary interesting to consider joining Stars to participate in future conversations as well. The positive conversations allow editors to share feedback on new initiatives and explore opportunities with Fandom Staff! Want to learn more about Fandom Stars? Reach out to a Community Team member, Fandom Star, or apply directly for the program here.