Thanks, everyone who attended mobile web + apps quarterly planning! It was a marathon session of high-level direction-setting, breakout brainstorming, technical discussions, and kittens (<3 Kristen). Here's where I think we've landed:
Mobile web
In the next 3 months, the mobile web team will focus on new contribution mechanisms via mobile, beyond wikitext editing. Specifically, we'll be testing a few versions of WikiGrok[1], packaging the feature as a Mediawiki extension so that it can scale to production, and release it to all logged in users on the mobile site of English Wikipedia. Before releasing to stable, we'll take a look at the quality of submissions we get in the beta period (before the feature pushes data to Wikidata) to decide on whether we need to implement any quality-control mechanisms (e.g., aggregating data rather than pushing it immediately).
We may also experiment with a few ways to create more engagement with the feature (e.g., a persistent menu item that serves people more relevant Wikipedia articles to tag, a progress bar, leaderboard, etc.) and, if we have time, start thinking about the logged out user (e.g. reader) experience.
Apps
The apps team will focus on reader engagement to build a class of more engaged Wikipedia app readers who are able to find more of the high-quality content all our projects offer, faster and easier. First we'll tackle improvements to the search experience, building out full-text search and experimenting with surfacing Wikidata short descriptors along with search results. We'll spend two sprints working on design and usability improvements aimed at casual readers who struggle to find the basic information they need in the app. Finally, the team will begin investigating using native notifications to bring readers back to the app.
Longer out, in the next 6-12 months, this puts both teams on a trajectory to using Wikidata to generate infoboxes on mobile web and apps, which opens up both much more intuitive, mobile-friendly design opportunities and new contribution funnels (not just adding/removing infobox items but potentially getting readers to sort them for relevance). With a native notifications framework in the apps, we'll also be able to more actively funnel users to some of the future big-ticket engagement features we came up with during brainstorming (e.g., Pinterest-like sharable article collections, trending articles, alerts when your saved articles have changed, etc.)
Obviously, Wikidata is a big dependency for both teams – luckily, Lydia, the PM for Wikidata (cc'ed) is coming to town soon :) so we'll be talking more with her about how our teams can work together to create amazing things with Wikidata.
Some other next steps include working with Research & Analytics on a plan for WikiGrok A/B testing, figuring out our qualitative analysis needs with the UX research crew, and doing some design boiler room sessions on apps notifications features and some of the other reader engagement features we identified as high priority (that won't necessarily make it into the apps this quarter but will need a lot of prep work). Dan and I will be reaching out to you all for these things over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned...
If you're interested in learning more, check out the notes on our various etherpads to see the details of what we discussed in each session:
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