VisualEditor on mobile report

This page contains a rough outline of the report that is being produced as part of the Editing team's work from the annual plan, as described at m:Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2018-2019/Audiences#Outcome 3: Mobile Contribution.

Background
The 2018–2019 Annual Plan for the Wikimedia Foundation focuses on growing new contributors and content, with a major focus on mobile editing.

The number of people using mobile devices to access Wikimedia sites is constantly increasing, and there are many users now who access Wikimedia sites exclusively through mobile devices. In particular, emerging Wikimedia communities have many more primarily and exclusively mobile users compared to existing communities. Editing using wikitext is a barrier for many of these users, due to both the unfamiliar markup system and the additional difficulties created by the use of mobile devices, such as the smaller screens, which allow contributors to see and preview only a fraction of a page at a time, and the absence of common markup characters, such as  and , on the devices' main keyboard views, and many other factors.

The visual editor is available on the mobile web, and solves many of the above complexities. However, the mobile visual editor has usability, user experience, and performance issues, and is difficult for users to find in the interface. The reasons for these issues involve complex interactions between different technical-, design-, and community-based challenges. In addition to the visual editor, there is also the potential to build new visual-based forms of contribution that do not involve the visual editor itself.

The target audience for this work to improve visual-based mobile editing is new contributors, with the aim of retaining these contributors so that they continue to create new content.

Objective of this report
Since the official launch of mobile editing in July 2013, improvements to the mobile editing experience have been done by multiple different teams at the Wikimedia Foundation and by multiple different groups of volunteer editors and developers. Due to the piecemeal nature of the mobile editing improvements, there is little understanding or documentation of what the experience is for users, from starting their first edits to becoming regular contributors.

The objective of this report is to document the current state of mobile editing, and the challenges that exist, so that improvements can be made to the highest impact areas. In particular, the aim of this report is to:


 * list what the Editing team currently believes the main use cases for mobile editing are.
 * document the end-to-end existing workflow for users.
 * document "bigger problems" not directly related to specific steps of the workflow.
 * propose some ways of improving visual-based mobile editing.
 * stimulate discussion with both senior management and the communities about ways things can be improved.

The report will be updated on based on feedback, but ultimately the report is intended to be a static documentation of the current understanding of mobile editing, and not to be a moving target to document of ALL the things. Further reports and documents will be produced, and ultimately action items will go in Phabricator tasks.

A timeline of mobile editing
Mobile editing has evolved significantly over the years.


 * July 2013: wikitext editing on mobile web for registered users is released
 * October 2013: visual editing on mobile web (as non-default) is released to production
 * June 2014: wikitext editing for anonymous and registered users is released on new native Android app
 * July 2014: wikitext editing for anonymous and registered users is released on new native iOS app
 * August 2014: anonymous editing on mobile web is released to alpha


 * March 2015: anonymous editing on mobile web is rolled out to production
 * add more about experiments with things like description editing in the apps?

Current state of mobile web editing workflow
The editing process begins when the user taps edit. Upon tapping edit, the user is taken to a modal dialogue that presents them with three options: edit anonymously, create account, and sign up.

screenshot?

Upon choosing one of the actions and completing it, the user is immediately taken to the source editor, which shows them the wikitext for the article. On many wikis, the user's viewport is filled with template syntax for the infobox, so a new user can't immediately understand how what they're seeing now relates to what they were reading.

screenshot?

The visual editor is available on mobile web, but it is not exposed to the user in a clear way. The edit pencil at the top of the viewport allows users to switch to visual editing, and when they do so, they are presented with the mobile web version of the visual editor.

screenshot?

This version of the visual editor has stripped down functionality compared to the desktop version. add more

For the use cases defined above:

What does existing mobile VE do well?

What does existing mobile VE do badly?

Are the pain points fixable within VE, or do we need to build something else?

Understanding the use cases
In general, people have very different habits when using the internet on mobile devices; people generally tend to have more sessions, but the sessions tend to be shorter. [add more general background]

In light of the above, the main use cases we aim to support are:


 * adding or removing text.
 * making minor formatting changes, such as adding bold or italics.
 * adding links to other pages on-wiki.
 * adding a citation, in particular by using citoid.

Similar to the desktop, users are exposed to editing on the mobile web by the edit pencil that is on every page section, as well as at the top of the page itself.

How many mobile editors use VE vs wikitext?

What kinds of edits do current mobile editors make?


 * Change to the text, links, citations, infoboxes, images?

What do current mobile editors struggle with?

Where are we losing people?

''What are the main use cases that we need to support, in order to attract and retain more new mobile users? (What will they be successful at?)''

In the mobile-heavy wikis, are people mostly writing text, or translating?

Citations workflow

 * Call to action for new citation
 * Opening the tool
 * Choosing website/book/journal
 * Filling out fields
 * Saving
 * Verifying it's done
 * Opening an existing citation
 * Updating

What are the problems with this workflow for new users?

 * First thing the user is shown when they tap edit is a three-choice full-screen modal dialogue
 * After they choose an option, they're shown a screen full of wikitext with no other context
 * It's difficult to figure out how to use VE
 * VE is not performant on mobile
 * [add more]

Bigger problems

 * Screen scrolling inappropriately
 * [add more]

Options for improvements
Two broad categories for ways to address the problem:


 * 1) Improve VE and expose it more to users:
 * 2) Look at the UX issues in the end-to-end workflow and improve (and, possibly, remove) steps
 * 3) e.g. is it correct to have the first step be a full-screen three option modal? do we have evidence that it's bad, or just intuition?
 * 4) MEASURE MEASURE MEASURE
 * 5) Look at performance, measure it, figure out how to improve it, or indeed if it can be improved to a suitable level
 * 6) Performance breakdowns by common devices, etc.
 * 7) Does paragraph-level editing help solve these issues?
 * 8) Look at VE proper, and whether the UX is actually optimised properly for mobile
 * 9) do we remove buttons, strip functionality?
 * 10) How do we convince communities that it's something worth using?
 * 11) Most communities, including many large communities, have VE as the default experience on desktop (German, Portuguese, Russian WPs, etc.)
 * 12) Some large communities do not (English, Dutch, French WPs, etc.)
 * 13) None have VE as the default on mobile - how do we change that, and do we even want to change it?
 * 14) Come up with alternative visual-based editing experiences, and expose those to users
 * 15) Things like sentence-level editing allow a visual-based editing experience that is more lightweight
 * 16) How would such experiences be exposed to people?
 * 17) Would it take more work to build something from scratch, and then have to maintain that as well?

''It's not necessarily an either-or to these options, but trying to do both simultaneously would almost certainly be a mistake...? Perhaps one could be tackled, then the other.''

Next steps
List specific action items and timelines:


 * Soliciting feedback from management in the Foundation (e.g. Katherine, Toby, etc.)
 * [add timeline]
 * Soliciting feedback from users
 * [add timeline]