Hi everyone,
The Android team has recently released watchlists, talk pages, and an image
recommendations experiment. To make sure we hear from editors we don't
normally hear from
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Communication/UsertestingJuly2021#Primary_feedback_audience>
in the software development process, and who might have needs and use cases
we miss, we also specifically reached out to a list of communities,
regions, and types of users.
We were fortunate enough to also get some feedback from Indonesian
Wikipedia editors, Arabic editors in Morocco, and an English Wikipedia
editor based in Nigeria. The outcomes of our respondents' qualitative
feedback
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Communication/UsertestingJuly2021#Results>,
coupled with previous feedback from the community and members of staff,
along with an ABC test <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290995> we are
finishing up, has resulted in us finalizing the changes we are making in
the app to ensure communication is not lost for our users.
Our most recent release
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia> now ensures
users can see their notifications in-app no matter what screen they are on,
including while reading an article, something that was highly requested
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mobile_communication_bugs>.
Before After
As we wrap up our work on notifications, we will shift from ensuring every
user that edits on the Android app can clearly see the notifications and
alerts they've received to ensuring the workflows for sending a
communication are as intuitive as possible for mobile devices. We already
have native user and article talk pages in the app. We will now conduct
research to see what gaps exist for our users, and introduce new (to us)
concepts like quick reactions; please check out this demo
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-xQSCREGic> to see our ideas so far.
We hope you will engage with us and tell us any thoughts you have regarding
promoting communication in our movement through the use of our tools. We
also encourage you to send more users our way that meet the demographics we
requested for notifications. Feel free to reach out to our team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team>, or comment on our
team's communications project talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Communication>
.
PS: If you're an iOS user, they're also working on some great things
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Notifications#September_2021_update>
related to communications.
Cheers,
--
Dmitry Brant
Lead Software Engineer (Android)
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering