2021-2022

Crafting a UX vision for Wikifunctions, a multilingual, open source platform where developers and non-developers can write collaboratively write code.

Background

I joined the Foundation to work on Abstract Wikipedia, a project aiming to transfer knowledge between the over 300 language wikis, so that they can benefit from each other's unique databases. My life's mission is to contribute my skills as a technologist and a designer towards creating a more just and equitable society. This project seemed aligned with that mission.

Step one of the vision towards Abstract Wikipedia is Wikifunctions, a platform for our global developer community to write functions that can generate natural language in the over 300 languages of the wikis.

I was the first designer to join this team of engineers. They did not have a product manager either. Over the course of a year, I did the following:

• assisted the Project Lead and Tech Lead in defining the product vision, requirements, roadmap, and success metrics
• assisted in managing cross-functional stakeholders, including the Architecture team, the Board of Trustees, and the Wikimedia linguistic community
• introduced a design process to the product development process
• led research for defining our target audience
• designed, tested, and implemented workflows for how a user creates, implements, and tests functions
• designed, tested, and implemented several smaller features for Wikifunctions
• crafted a vision for the overall UX of Wikifunctions

Product strategy

My design co-lead and I created a questionnaire to guide our Project Lead in defining the product vision. We tried to define what Wikifunctions was, was not, who it’s for, key activities or actions performed on the platform, how it connects to Abstract Wikipedia, its potential impact, and the ecosystem in which it will exist.