Hello all,
We’ve been looking at some initial results from the Share a Fact feature
introduced on the Wikipedia apps for Android and iOS in its basic "minimal
viable product" implementation. Here’s some analysis, using data from one
day (20150512) with respect to the latest stable versions of the apps
(2.0-r-2015-04-23 on Android and 4.1.2 on iOS) for that day.
* On iOS, when a user initiates the first step of the default sharing
workflow - tapping the up-arrow box share button (6,194 non-highlighting
instances for the day under question) - about 11.7% of the time it yielded
successful sharing.
* On Android, it’s not possible to easily tell when the sharing workflow
was carried through to successful share, but we anticipate the Android
success rate is currently much higher, as general engagement percentage up
to the point of picking an app for sharing is higher on Android than on iOS.
* On Android, when presented with the share card preview, 28.0% of the time
the ‘Share as image’ button was tapped and 55.5% of the time the 'Share as
text' button was tapped, whereas on iOS it was 8.4% ‘Share as image’ and
16.8% ‘Share as text’.
* The forthcoming 4.1.4 version of the iOS app will relax its default
sharing snippet generation rules and be more like the Android version in
that respect. We anticipate this will result in higher engagement with both
the ‘Share as image’ and ‘Share as text’ buttons on iOS, and we should be
able to verify this once the 4.1.4 iOS version is released and generally
adopted (usually takes 4-5 days after release; the 4.1.4 release isn’t
released yet).
* On the Android app the ‘Share’ option is located on the overflow menu,
not as part of the main set of UI buttons. This potentially increases the
likelihood of Android users being primed to step through the workflow. On
the iOS app, the share button (up-arrow box) is plainly visible from the
main UI and not an overflow menu, and this probably creates a different
priming dynamic for the iOS demographic.
* When users on iOS tapped on the ‘Share as image’ or ‘Share as text’
buttons, there is a pretty sharp drop off at the next stage - the system
sharesheet. Once the sharesheet was presented to iOS users, 41.6% of the
time it resulted in active abandonment. We believe this probably has
something to do with the relatively small set of default apps listed on the
sharesheet and the extra work involved with exposing additional social apps
for sharing in that context. As with the Android app, the labels of ‘Share
as image’ and ’Share as text’ may also pose something of a hurdle at least
for first time users of the feature. To this end, there is an onboarding
tutorial planned at least on Android.
* For a one hour period (2015051201) there were about 100 pageviews in some
sense attributable to Share a Fact using a provenance parameter available
on the latest stable versions of the apps at that time; this may slightly
overstate the number of pageviews attributable to the two specific apps
reviewed in this analysis, but probably not too much (n.b., previously a
different source parameter was used than the new wprov provenance
parameter). Pageviews are not the sole motivation for the feature, but
following the trendline over the long run should be interesting. Impact on
social media and the destinations of shares is a little harder to capture
directly, but
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%40wikipedia%20-%40itzwikipedia…
gives one a sense about image shares, at least.
* A couple potential options for increasing sharing include:
** Trying to add support for sharing to the Photos app on iOS. People may
be interested in using images from the Photos apps for various workflows,
as Dan Garry has noted.
** Offering a more concise app picklist, in particular explicitly adding
the native OS app components (namely, Twitter and Facebook, and as
mentioned, Photos if possible), with an option to expose the sharesheet for
additional options if necessary. This is probably also somewhat confined to
iOS, although conceivably a similar approach could be possible on Android.
On Android the full list of applications in its equivalent of the
sharesheet is by default readily available to the user, though.
** On Android, exposing the diagonal arrow share button on the main
interface akin to how the iOS version of the app shows the up-arrow share
button. This may introduce more opportunities for sharing (and thus numbers
of abandons would go up in tandem with numbers of shares), but would also
partially clutter the interface and probably increase abandon. A controlled
experiment may be useful for observing the impact of such an approach.
* As a point of reference, for the app versions in scope for this analysis
over a single day, there appeared to be approximately 3.78 million
Wikipedia for Android pageviews and 1.19 Wikipedia Mobile for iOS app
pageviews. There were about 6.73 million app pageviews on the “modern”
versions of these apps total for this particular day, meaning there were
about 1.75 million pageviews on other modern versions of the app.
* Examination of the categories of successful shares on iOS showed the
following distributions:
Images:
48.5% messaging
25.5% sharesheet copy
22.9% social
1.8% productivity
0.9% reading
Text:
53.6% messaging
31.9% sharesheet copy
7.1% social
5.4% reading
2.0% productivity
Here were some queries used in the analysis:
== SHARE A FACT ATTRIBUTABLE PAGEVIEWS FOR ONE HOUR ==
select wprov, uri_host, count(*) from (select x_analytics_map['wprov'] as
wprov, uri_host
from webrequest where year = 2015 and month = 5 and day = 12 and hour = 1
and is_pageview = true and uri_host like '%.wikipedia.org' and
x_analytics_map['wprov'] is not null) t
group by wprov, uri_host;
== PAGE VIEWS FOR THE DAY FOR THE “MODERN” VERSIONS OF THE APPS ==
SELECT
user_agent, count(*)
FROM
wmf.webrequest
tablesample(BUCKET 1 OUT OF 100 ON rand())
WHERE
YEAR = 2015
AND MONTH = 5
AND DAY = 12
AND is_pageview = TRUE
AND lower(uri_host) like '%.wikipedia.org'
AND user_agent like 'WikipediaApp%'
GROUP BY user_agent;
== HIGHLIGHTING SESSION CASE FOR SPECIFIC VERSIONS OF THE APPS ==
select CASE WHEN t2.userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' THEN
'Android' WHEN t2.userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%' THEN 'iOS'
END AS
'ua', t1.event_action, t1.event_sharemode, t1.event_target, count(*) from
MobileWikiAppShareAFact_11331974 t1 inner join
MobileWikiAppShareAFact_11331974 t2 on t1.event_shareSessionToken =
t2.event_shareSessionToken where t1.timestamp > '20150512' and
t1.timestamp < '20150513' and t2.timestamp > '20150512' and
t2.timestamp <
'20150513' and t1.event_action != 'highlight' and t2.event_action =
'highlight' and (t2.userAgent like 'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' or
t2.userAgent like 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%') group by ua, t1.event_action,
t1.event_sharemode, t1.event_target;
== NON-HIGHLIGHTING SESSION CASE FOR SPECIFIC VERSIONS OF THE APPS ==
n.b., subtract the highlighting cases from the non-highlighting cases to
arrive at the default sharing behavior. Technically, inner joins can be
used to do more comprehensive session analysis, but the queries take a long
time.
select CASE
WHEN userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' THEN 'Android'
WHEN userAgent LIKE 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%' THEN 'iOS'
END AS 'ua', event_action, event_sharemode, event_target,
count(*) from MobileWikiAppShareAFact_11331974 where timestamp > '20150512'
and timestamp < '20150513' and (userAgent like
'WikipediaApp/2.0-r-2015-04-23%' or userAgent like 'WikipediaApp/4.1.2%')
group by ua, event_action, event_sharemode, event_target;
-Adam