Mobile design/Watchlist view

This document describes the mobile watchlist feature for logged in users.

Rationale
Watchlists are one of the most heavily used and important features for editors on Wikipedia; patrolling changes to watched articles is a vital activity for maintaining the quality of the content on Wikimedia projects, as well as engaging users in contributory actions. However, the default desktop watchlist view is extremely crowded with information, contains redundant functionality, and is not mobile-friendly.

By providing a mobile-friendly watchlist view, we will allow editors to easily keep track of changes to things they care about on Wikipedia, which we hypothesize will indirectly boost editor engagement and encourage more activity in experienced editors.

Requirements

 * Create a mobile watchlist view that adds value to the experienced editor's workflow
 * Present the bare minimum required information for the editor to understand the changes that have been made
 * Summarize or use visual cues to convey complex information where possible
 * Leave space for features that may come in next iterations (e.g., diff view, tagging revisions, etc.)

In progress

 * Watchlist logged-in view: A mobile-friendly feed of recent changes to articles on the user's watchlist


 * Drill-down watchlist view: A deeper secondary view at the revision level, presenting meta-information about what has changed and who changed it


 * Diff view: Integrating the difference between revisions view into the drill-down watchlist view

Planned

 * Save for later: Revision-level tagging to highlight important changes and act on them later


 * Read later: Article-level saving for a mobile-friendly view of the "View and edit raw watchlist" feature on desktop


 * Mobile-desktop watchlist integration: Making mobile watchlist changes such as revision tagging persist in the desktop watchlist view

User experience
This feature is intended to be used by experienced editors who already have many pages saved in their watchlist.

Adding to watchlist
Pages that have been added to the watchlist on both desktop and on mobile will appear in the mobile watchlist view. On mobile, users can add articles in the same way as on desktop: by tapping the watchlist star.

Viewing pages
Users can view changes to watched pages by navigating to the watchlist view. Information will be presented relative to user's current time, with most recently changed pages at the top and less recent changes at the bottom. From this view, the user will be able to see the name of the page that changed and the user who made the change. They will also be able to see some or all of the edit comment and when the change was made relative to user's current time. Some information may be abridged, such as long article names and edit comments.

Viewing changes
Users will be able to tap on any revision and go to a separate page, where a deeper view of the changes (full article name and edit comment, bytes added/removed) will be presented. The user will be able to tap on the page title to go to the page, and on the username to go to the talk page of the user (if applicable).

Story and assets

 * Story #150 - Watchlist view
 * Story #231 - Drill-down view
 * Story #232 - Watchlist star behavior

Implementation
In-progress work in branch at https://github.com/brion/MobileFrontend/commits/watchlist Will squash and merge once it's got a little more work on it. --brion (talk) 00:55, 23 October 2012 (UTC)