Grants:Project/Kiwix/User Experience/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Kiwix/User Experience.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Methods and activities

Admin

all contractors have been recruited;
The guy we'd initially recruited to do the UI has dumped us right before signing, so rather than restart the hiring process (and delay everything by 3 months) we've asked our core engineer to step up. This is a costlier solution than initially budgeted for, but we were rather short of options.

Tech

multizim support has been achieved;
we also have most concepts and mockups sorted;
Kiwix-Android 3.0 is late, partly the result of our spending most of March-April handling a tsunami of volunteers during the GSoC application period, and also the fact that our lead volunteer on Android has to prepare (and pass) his exams.

The full list of milestones and where we stand vis-à-vis these can be found here.

Midpoint outcomes

As indicated above, we have most of our UI sorted, the UX is still under discussion. For the curious, here's where's we are coming from and heading to (click on slideshow arrows; also, Kiwix 1.0 has never been officialy released, the current version is therefore 0.9.):

Kiwix 0.9 Library
Kiwix 2.0 Library

Kiwix 0.9 search
Kiwix 2.0 search

If anyone ever argues that UX design isn't an actual job, you can show them the above on our behalf.

Finances

Using our C++ senior developer to replace the Qt one and develop the UI will severely impact costs: we expect the final cost to be around 67'000 CHF for dev (UX+UI) alone (instead of the ridiculously optimistic 55kCHF we'd initially budgeted). Another worrying trend is the constant rise of the euro (our C++/Qt contractor is paid in euros): it's gained about 3-5% since we budgeted for this grant. A 5% variance may not seem much, but it will probably add up to an extra CHF 2'000.- by the time this grant is over.

So when life, labour- and currency markets serve us lemons, we try to make lemonade: the large Spring hackathon will be replaced by a much smaller Google Serve event (expected budget: 2'000.- CHF; note that the hackathon itself isn't canceled but postponed to September). Infrastructure costs (hosting, certificates) are on course.


Item	Budgeted	Spent	%
Contractors	55'000	36'000	65.5%
Hackathon	10'000	0	0 %
Project Management	12'000	1'946.60	16.2%
Total	77'000	37'946.60	49.3%

Learnings

What are the challenges

Again, the HR part proved the most difficult: as far as coding is concerned, it really is a sellers' market and it did hurt our feelings that the guy we'd initially recruited to do the UI dumped us overnight. There is also a little bit of paperwork involved for the work contract for our Swiss-based UX gentleman. It is very manageable but somewhat tedious: if there is one learning to share here, it is that chosing between contractors and employees is essentially a tradeoff between money and time: a contractor is more expensive but requires almost no paperwork, whereas an employee is somewhat cheaper but more time-consuming in admin tasks.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Big up to the Wikimedia Foundation's UX team (Nizar, Rita et al.) : they're being extremely supportive, from helping in the recruitment process to making Robin available for us and spending some of their time to give him feedback. Thanks, people!

Next steps and opportunities

The next big thing will be the implementation of all UX recommendations and the release of the first Kiwix 2.0 (alpha) nightlies in the second half of May.