Hi everyone,

The Mobile Apps Team met today to continue our discussion about some of the issues we face with adapting Wikipedia articles to the small screen. In particular, the issues we’re facing in handling tables and infoboxes.

Basically, there are two major design issues with tables and infoboxes right now:

• Infoboxes are very long, meaning that you often have to scroll for an excessively long time to get past them and back into the prose.
  
• Infoboxes don’t look good on the screen because they’re too wide and were constructed only with how they look on large screens in mind.

These issues make article display sloppy and disincline people from continuing to use the app. For example, quite a few staff at the office often save articles to other apps such as Instapaper rather than using the Wikipedia app, because we’ve not handled issues such as these properly.

The latter issue is hard to grapple with as it’s a problem which is compounded by the lack of uniformity in the way infoboxes are used, meaning that for every fix there are thousands of edge cases that are not handled properly. Many of our competitor apps only trivially change the formatting of infoboxes due to the complexity of the problem, for example changing the font and adding or removing some horizontal lines.

The former issue, however, is a bit easier to deal with. Recognising that tables present such large issues for small screens, the commonly taken approach by our competitor apps here is to either totally strip infoboxes and tables from articles, or more commonly to aggressively collapse all tables so that the user has to explicitly choose to open them. The tradeoff here is, of course, that the very useful information contained in the infobox is now hidden and therefore we would have a duty to expose information to the users, but there are lightweight ways of mitigating that which can be considered (e.g. a little tooltip).

At this stage we have no action items out of this, but we’re continuing to explore these things in advance of our two sprints dedicated to design issues.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Thanks,
Dan

--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation