Some thoughts inline.


On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
... 
I don't have a strong opinion myself, but the current tendency is to show all the boxes rather than just a few, as it is now.

This begs the question - is it really good for mobile readers?

Depending on user agent support for it, text-overflow adjusted with media queries for screen dimensions may be one way to tighten up stuff if screen real estate is the issue.

For example, is the mobile main page very popular at all, or is there much more traffic to the articles?

I don't know about main page pageviews relative to total pageviews, as the formal definition of a pageview is I think being refined, but it looks like, for example, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page was accessed about 9.9 million times in the prior day's log. [1]
 
Is there a difference between mobile main page traffic in the app and in the mobile web?

Mobile web main page pageviews are proportionally larger than mobile app traffic from what I understand, and that seems to be the case at first glance. [2] In the Wikipedia for Android app, startup behavior is to go to the main page for the language of the user (first time use has an account splash screen). In the Wikipedia for iOS app the startup behavior (post-first time use account splash screen) is to go to the main page for the language of the user, and subsequent app launches go to the last reading location. The user can change the language from the in-app settings. Both the Android and iOS app now have a "Today" button in the navbar now (like the "Home" button on the mobile web), too, to get the user back to the main page in the current language.
 
Are there any known good practices for mobile main page design?

One is speed. Careful inlining of some ResourceLoader stuff and getting the additional main page <img> tags pointing at the same domain as the HTML of the main page might help.

-Adam 

[1] $ zcat mobile-sampled-100.tsv.log-20140808.gz | cut -f9 | grep 'http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page' | sort | uniq -c
Then multiply times 100 for the specific row.

[2] A hackish grep, with the result * 100 suggests about 394K Main Page loads, assuming I didn't mess up.

$ zcat mobile-sampled-100.tsv.log-20140808.gz | cut -f9,14 | grep WikipediaApp | grep 'wikipedia.org/w/api.php?' | grep 'page=Main+Page\|Main%20Page' | grep -c 'sections=0'