On Friday afternoon, Juliusz, Dan Foy and I sat down to test the mobile site on a few lower-end phones and browsers. Specifically, we looked at en.m.wikipedia on a Nokia not running JavaScript and a higher-end Samsung phone (Juliusz's) running Opera Mini.Some issues we may want to figure out/fix at some point in the near-to-medium future, in order of priority:1) Using screen size detection to decide whether to serve certain features to lower-end devices results in some unexpected issues, like the watchlist star showing up in landscape mode but not portrait mode on Nokia no js. More pressingly, the search field frame doesn't show up on Opera Mini on a higher-end phone, despite the fact that it's a no-JS experience (and has no placeholders in the search field, making the search area weirdly blank and confusing). According to Dan, the Opera Mini + higher end Android phone combo is pretty common in the developing world, so we probably need a better way to handle it. There's an open bug on this here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64926
2) Another issue with Opera mini not showing placeholders: the login and create account forms appear blank, so it's pretty much impossible to figure out what to enter into each of the fields. Bug here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687583) The watch/unwatch workflow in no-JS mode is pretty wonky: when you tap the watch star, you get taken to a separate page (which has the article title at the top, making it look sort of like the article is broken/missing) that tells you you're now watching the article, but the star doesn't change state and there's no way to get back to the article without using browser/device back.# 2 & 3 point to a larger issue, which is whether login is really worth it for these users, if pretty much all they can do is watch/unwatch articles and look at changes to them – the watchlist features might be more confusing than beneficial, especially in the suboptimal way they're now implemented, and the Mobile Web team doesn't really have the time/bandwidth to improve them at this point.
I'm leaning toward suggesting that we remove login/account creation entirely on no-JS devices and Opera Mini browser and only revisit it when we can build a robust set of features that meet clear end-user needs – but I'd be interested in hearing what you guys (Zero + Mobile Web) think, and how we might test to figure out what these user needs are.
The full notes from our testing are here: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Lower_end_devices_checkup--
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