Reading/Mexico Readers Research

About
The Reading Team was created in April 2015 to take on building better experiences for Wikimedia project readers. While defining strategic goals for the team, we came to the conclusion that it is critical for us to create reading experiences particular to readers in the global south.

(Note: "Global south" is a less-than-ideal term that is currently being discussed within WMF. We're using it here for now as a proxy, and will update terminology when there is consensus within the Foundation for a better classification.)

Why the global south?
The next billion people are coming online worldwide in the global south. Mobile Internet penetration will grow from 28% to 45% in developing markets from 2014 to 2020 (GSM Report), which is an increase of 700 million potential readers and editors (1.55 billion now; 2.25 billion in 2020) compared to 600 million total today in the global north. Our readership ratios are inverted compared to population; 78% of our page views are from the Global North and this number has been flat for more than a year.

WMF has previously focused on developing the Wikimedia movement in the global south mainly through access (through Wikipedia Zero) and editing (through grant making). That said, we have a lot to learn about the different constraints and behaviors for people outside of the global north, particularly when it comes to product development.

Through a better understanding of users in the global south, we will improve the interface of the Wikimedia projects to help readers access our content. With more engaged readers, we hope that editing will also increase and plan to share what we learn along the way with the Editing Team to help build the non-English wikis.

What we know
The global south is not a single, monolithic region. With over 150 countries classified as being in the global south, we cannot define any single sweeping characteristics. In order to build great products, we need to focus on building the right features for some group of our potential readers and then expand from there. To that end, we developed a number of dimensions to segment the market in order to narrow our focus, as described in the Industry Analysis deck.

We still have a lot to learn about how people in the global south approach knowledge, both on- and offline. In order to develop understanding for our product teams, we are planning a Deep Dive. A team of WMF researchers (a mix of Product/Engineering, Design Research, and Partnerships) will be traveling to Mexico in February 2016 for deep ethnographic research.

Non-Wikimedian interviews

 * In this portion of research, we will focus on learning about how people who don't have a lot of experience with Wikimedia projects approach knowledge and the internet.
 * 16 interviews, segmented:
 * Participants will vary in their usage of Wikipedia from non-users to frequent readers
 * 6 interviews for each age range: age 15-17 / 18-25 / 26-35
 * 8 men and 8 women
 * 6 with unlimited access to the internet, 6 with moderate access to internet (has access but financial or other considerations limit use), 6 with limited access to the internet (use is occasional and may be dependent on access to other peoples devices and where digital confidence is low)
 * Interview format
 * Conducted in participants' native language
 * 90 minutes, mixed between
 * Conversation with structured questions
 * Drawing or collage mapping of users ecosystem of technology (devices, connections to the internet, electricity)
 * "Remember the future" (more description to come)

Expert interviews
We will also meet with experts in various fields who have more involvement with Wikimedia projects, especially around medical and educational work. This will include active editors, community/chapter members, translators, and community health workers who use Wikimedia projects in their day to day lives. These interviews will be less structured.

Why Mexico?
We hope to conduct similar research in many regions worldwide, starting with Mexico. We decided for this first effort to focus on an area that we thought we could maximize the impact. This location would be somewhere that shares some characteristics to the places we know Wikipedia is read widely, the global north, but has limitations and lower traffic comparatively. We looked for an area with:
 * Strong local community with good relationship to WMF
 * Language competency of the team
 * Cost to travel
 * Relatively high internet penetration
 * Relatively high mobile penetration

Ideas for product focus areas
(being updated all the time, please add ideas to the talk page)
 * Speed/Performance (in progress by Reading Web & performance teams)
 * Language switching - are readers looking to be able to switch between languages in order to get better definitions?
 * Simpler content in English
 * simple.wikipedia.org
 * Medical translations
 * Improving the offline experience
 * Improving multimedia content

Results
We have concluded the interviews and are in the process of analyzing. We will be doing as much of this on-wiki as possible, keeping in mind that some participants requested to have their personally identifiable information available only within the Foundation.

Follow our process here.

See the full list of participant profiles here.