New subject: [WikimediaMobile] Share a Fact Initial Analysis

21 May 2015

Hi all - some interesting analysis on the share-a-fact feature from the mobile team. 

-Toby

Begin forwarded message:

...
  From: Adam Baso &lt;abaso(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
 Date: May 21, 2015 at 12:05:29 PDT
 To: mobile-l &lt;mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
 Subject: [WikimediaMobile] Share a Fact Initial Analysis

 Hello all,

 We’ve been looking at some initial results from the Share a Fact feature introduced on
the Wikipedia apps for Android and iOS in its basic "minimal viable product"
implementation. Here’s some analysis, using data from one day (20150512) with respect to
the latest stable versions of the apps (2.0-r-2015-04-23 on Android and 4.1.2 on iOS) for
that day.

 * On iOS, when a user initiates the first step of the default sharing workflow - tapping
the up-arrow box share button (6,194 non-highlighting instances for the day under
question) - about 11.7% of the time it yielded successful sharing.

 * On Android, it’s not possible to easily tell when the sharing workflow was carried
through to successful share, but we anticipate the Android success rate is currently much
higher, as general engagement percentage up to the point of picking an app for sharing is
higher on Android than on iOS.

 * On Android, when presented with the share card preview, 28.0% of the time the ‘Share as
image’ button was tapped and 55.5% of the time the 'Share as text' button was
tapped, whereas on iOS it was 8.4% ‘Share as image’ and 16.8% ‘Share as text’.

 * The forthcoming 4.1.4 version of the iOS app will relax its default sharing snippet
generation rules and be more like the Android version in that respect. We anticipate this
will result in higher engagement with both the ‘Share as image’ and ‘Share as text’
buttons on iOS, and we should be able to verify this once the 4.1.4 iOS version is
released and generally adopted (usually takes 4-5 days after release; the 4.1.4 release
isn’t released yet).

 * On the Android app the ‘Share’ option is located on the overflow menu, not as part of
the main set of UI buttons. This potentially increases the likelihood of Android users
being primed to step through the workflow. On the iOS app, the share button (up-arrow box)
is plainly visible from the main UI and not an overflow menu, and this probably creates a
different priming dynamic for the iOS demographic.

 * When users on iOS tapped on the ‘Share as image’ or ‘Share as text’ buttons, there is a
pretty sharp drop off at the next stage - the system sharesheet. Once the sharesheet was
presented to iOS users, 41.6% of the time it resulted in active abandonment. We believe
this probably has something to do with the relatively small set of default apps listed on
the sharesheet and the extra work involved with exposing additional social apps for
sharing in that context. As with the Android app, the labels of ‘Share as image’ and
’Share as text’ may also pose something of a hurdle at least for first time users of the
feature. To this end, there is an onboarding tutorial planned at least on Android.

 * For a one hour period (2015051201) there were about 100 pageviews in some sense
attributable to Share a Fact using a provenance parameter available on the latest stable
versions of the apps at that time; this may slightly overstate the number of pageviews
attributable to the two specific apps reviewed in this analysis, but probably not too much
(n.b., previously a different source parameter was used than the new wprov provenance
parameter). Pageviews are not the sole motivation for the feature, but following the
trendline over the long run should be interesting. Impact on social media and the
destinations of shares is a little harder to capture directly, but
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%40wikipedia%20-%40itzwikipedia…
gives one a sense about image shares, at least.

 * A couple potential options for increasing sharing include:

 ** Trying to add support for sharing to the Photos app on iOS. People may be interested
in using images from the Photos apps for various workflows, as Dan Garry has noted.

 ** Offering a more concise app picklist, in particular explicitly adding the native OS
app components (namely, Twitter and Facebook, and as mentioned, Photos if possible), with
an option to expose the sharesheet for additional options if necessary. This is probably
also somewhat confined to iOS, although conceivably a similar approach could be possible
on Android. On Android the full list of applications in its equivalent of the sharesheet
is by default readily available to the user, though.

 ** On Android, exposing the diagonal arrow share button on the main interface akin to how
the iOS version of the app shows the up-arrow share button. This may introduce more
opportunities for sharing (and thus numbers of abandons would go up in tandem with numbers
of shares), but would also partially clutter the interface and probably increase abandon.
A controlled experiment may be useful for observing the impact of such an approach.

 * As a point of reference, for the app versions in scope for this analysis over a single
day, there appeared to be approximately 3.78 million Wikipedia for Android pageviews and
1.19 Wikipedia Mobile for iOS app pageviews. There were about 6.73 million app pageviews
on the “modern” versions of these apps total for this particular day, meaning there were
about 1.75 million pageviews on other modern versions of the app.

 * Examination of the categories of successful shares on iOS showed the following
distributions:

 Images:
 48.5% messaging
 25.5% sharesheet copy
 22.9% social
 1.8% productivity
 0.9% reading

 Text:
 53.6% messaging
 31.9% sharesheet copy
 7.1% social
 5.4% reading
 2.0% productivity

 Here were some queries used in the analysis:

 == SHARE A FACT ATTRIBUTABLE PAGEVIEWS FOR ONE HOUR ==

 select wprov, uri_host, count(*) from (select x_analytics_map['wprov'] as wprov,
uri_host
 from webrequest where year = 2015 and month = 5 and day = 12 and hour = 1 and is_pageview
= true and uri_host like '%.wikipedia.org' and x_analytics_map['wprov'] is
not null) t
 group by wprov, uri_host;

 == PAGE VIEWS FOR THE DAY FOR THE “MODERN” VERSIONS OF THE APPS ==

 SELECT
   user_agent, count(*)
 FROM
   wmf.webrequest
   tablesample(BUCKET 1 OUT OF 100 ON rand())
 WHERE
   YEAR = 2015
   AND MONTH = 5
   AND DAY = 12
   AND is_pageview = TRUE
   AND lower(uri_host) like '%.wikipedia.org'
   AND user_agent like 'WikipediaApp%'
 GROUP BY user_agent;

 == HIGHLIGHTING SESSION CASE FOR SPECIFIC VERSIONS OF THE APPS ==
 select CASE WHEN t2.userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' THEN
'Android'  WHEN t2.userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%' THEN 'iOS'
END AS 'ua', t1.event_action, t1.event_sharemode, t1.event_target, count(*) from
MobileWikiAppShareAFact_11331974 t1 inner join MobileWikiAppShareAFact_11331974 t2 on
t1.event_shareSessionToken = t2.event_shareSessionToken where  t1.timestamp >
'20150512' and t1.timestamp < '20150513' and t2.timestamp >
'20150512' and t2.timestamp < '20150513' and t1.event_action !=
'highlight' and t2.event_action = 'highlight' and (t2.userAgent like
'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' or t2.userAgent like
'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%') group by ua, t1.event_action, t1.event_sharemode,
t1.event_target;

 == NON-HIGHLIGHTING SESSION CASE FOR SPECIFIC VERSIONS OF THE APPS ==
 n.b., subtract the highlighting cases from the non-highlighting cases to arrive at the
default sharing behavior. Technically, inner joins can be used to do more comprehensive
session analysis, but the queries take a long time.

 select CASE
 WHEN userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' THEN 'Android'
 WHEN userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%' THEN 'iOS'
 END AS 'ua', event_action, event_sharemode, event_target,
 count(*) from MobileWikiAppShareAFact_11331974 where timestamp > '20150512'
and timestamp < '20150513' and (userAgent like
'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' or userAgent like 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%')
group by ua, event_action, event_sharemode, event_target;

 -Adam
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