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:
Session 1: (Kickoff)
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Q2_planning_kickoff
Session 2: (Mobile web breakout session)
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/mobile_web_breakout
Session 3: (Mobile apps breakout session)
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/app_breakout
Session 4: (Technical discussion & wrap-up of apps)
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/mobile_Q2_planning
1.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend/WikiGrok
--
Maryana Pinchuk
Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org