Brandon, great to hear from you! I think you're working off of old information--like Matt said, you can edit via the app now. It's cool that you're inspired to bring up more questions, though, and I'm glad you're focusing on the design phase of the next experiment. Are you busy for the next ten years?
Another misconception or oversight I want to bring up is that Fundraising is the team pioneering the 2/3-page or full-page banners. We're driving readers from the website to completely closed and somewhat evil payments platforms. If there's any relevant or even irrelevant research about interstitials, please apply it to our work, cos we're about to have a huge impact on the English-speaking community in December. Any complaints about the Finnish mobile experiment and dogpiling on the awesome apps developers seem incredibly misplaced while I'm walking around with this "Kick Me" sign on my backside.
Thanks, Adam
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 12:12 PM, Brandon Harris bharris@gaijin.com wrote:
On Sep 2, 2015, at 3:53 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
- We're moving people from an open platform to a closed platform: I
think
this is an oversimplification of the situation -- as has been noted
before,
the android app is 100% open source and while the data is not, in my opinion, comprehensive, it's inarguable that a large percentage of mobile traffic on the internet is from apps. It's not possible to fulfill our mission[4] if Wikipedia and sister project content is not available in widely used channels.
I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense. The widest, most-opencontent channel that the projects have is through the web interfaces: all phones, all devices, all computers can access the same content in the same manner. That is to say: 100% of our readers have the ability to use the web versions (either desktop or mobile web) where as only a subset can use the Android app, which is a different subset that can use iOS. (They also end up having fragmented experiences, which is sub-optimal.)
So it seems to me that the apps are not required to fulfill themission. They feel like distractions, and - quite possibly - negatives to the mission (in that we can't convert Readers into Editors through the app).
(Which, by the way, this whole "focus entirely on readers" shiftseems counter-intuitive to me. Having a billion readers doesn't mean anything if there aren't any editors anymore. It's a complete failure at that point.)
- The campaign was not publicized before launch: We notified the Finnish
community on their Village pump before the campaign began[5] and the campaign is detailed on the central notice page[6]. We felt this was appropriate considering the scope of the test.
Restricting the conversation to two very small, almostimpenetrable discussion areas seems unwise. It seems obvious to me that this idea and action would cause friction with the community. I don't think there's any bad-faith going on here, but this definitely feels like an oversight.
- Banners/Interstitials don't work/suck/etc: There's a difference
between
a forced install and letting users know that an app exists and our designers have worked hard to make the banners effective without being excessively intrusive. You can see the designs on the Phab ticket above.
I
don't generally place a great deal of faith in blog posts or other company's data -- the google study showing the ineffectiveness of interstitials has already been challenged by other similarly reputable sources [7,8]. For this and other reasons, I believe that we need to
gather
our own data.
Is "our own data" more important than the goodwill of our users ordevelopers? I think that's a big part of why people might be upset about this: it's a step away from what had classically been the principles underlying the movement's activities.
Even that said, though: this is the first anyone is saying "yes,we did some research about interstitials". It seems to me that the Google study was something that could have been discussed ahead of time. I also don't understand why we can't do the whole Open Source thing and make use of other people's research, unless this indicates a further shift into "not invented here" territory.
- We don't understand what success looks like: We are planning a meeting
with our Research team[9] to assess the statistical validity of our results, but the basic question is if users read more content using the
app
than the mobile web. This information will help guide us on future
product
decisions and will be shared with the community.
An experiment without a box isn't an experiment. "We would like to determine if people read more throughthe apps than through the web interface" is a _great_ question (but also one that could probably be answered just by looking at squid logs). I don't know that it needs an advertising campaign to create app users to do it (though I could be wrong, and often am, and would love to hear how if so). It further seems that advertising the mobile apps would create a biases in the research (if only that "newish" app users are likely to use it more often earlier in their
"We would like to determine if people download the appmore often if they've been given an interstitial" is also an interesting question but it's got a secondary question that no one seems to care about: "How many readers have we put off from returning by showing them this interstitial?" I know that I often immediately shut windows and tabs when I'm told "download our app!"
If this were brought to the wider community in a different manner,there may have been a completely different response:
"We do not believe that people are aware that there areofficial Wikipedia apps. We would like to run an experiment to see how likely people are to switch to the app experience if they know it exists. Of those that switch, we would like to find out how many of them increase their usage of the content, and, ideally, we'd like to know which features of the app are the most popular and useful. Additionally, we'd like to know the drop-off counts. We want to do it in a controlled environment where we understand the patterns as they exist fairly well. We'll run this experiment for X days, and we know that there will be biases on W, Y, and Z."
I could easily get behind that set of questions. I don't really expect a response to any of this, by the way.
Brandon Harris :: bharris@gaijin.com :: made of steel wool and whiskey
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l