User:Jkatz (WMF)/sandbox/Q4proposal

Proposer
Maryana Pinchuk and Jon Katz, on behalf of the Mobile Web Team

Overview
Improve quick look up reader experience and bring exploratory projects to stable states. The mobile web team is looking to shift this quarter from spending nearly all of its resources on exploratory projects to a balance between solving known user problems for established use cases (65%) and exploring new use cases and features (35%). Similarly, having spent 2 quarters focusing on contributory mechanisms, we are looking to spend greater energy on readership features.

There 2 themes of work, however, the team breakout is likely to differ with a smaller team working on Gather and a larger team working on Wikigrok and readership.

Readership (mature use case): Quick look up improvements.
Over a third of our gobal traffic is going to the mobile web version of Wikimedia projects. The mobile web is serviceable, but it is not optimized for reading. The mobile app team has used its speed to experiment with optimized reader experiences. Given the growing population accessing our site via mobile web, and our ability to develop quickly on the mobile web, we should spend significant time to make some tactical improvements to make our MW experience better for our users. In doing so, we plan to take learnings from mobile app as starting points and passing learnings on to desktop. The overall goal for this quarter will be to identify specific areas where the user experience could be improved and begin testing potential improvements.

Deliverables:

 * Readability: Achieve greater mobile design and UX parity: port visual improvements (top of article experience) from app to mobile web to support quick lookup
 * Discovery: Identify ways we can enhance knowledge discovery via research and A/B testing (this might include changing search prominence, read more, find-in-page, and header behavior)
 * Optional/Stretch: share-a-fact integration/upsell (dependent on success in-app)

Contribution (exploratory use case): Curation and sharing
Last quarter we proved that users are interested in making casual contributions and that those contributions have the potential to be valuable. Given some external dependencies for the existing model, we would like to spend the next quarter stabilizing work on these two projects and figuring out the next contribution models to operationalize, rather than building out new ones.


 * WikiGrok: finish remaining aspects of the MVP workflow (return loop) to put it in a state where it can be picked up at a later date, when Wikidata backend/API/storage capabilities are more robust.
 * Gather: bring it to its MVP state in order to properly evaluate features that will inform product direction in a number of arenas.

Deliverables:

 * Taking Gather to its MVP: enhanced sharing capabilities at scale on Wikipedia.
 * Getting Wikigrok to 100%: releasing all campaigns in stable with WikiGrok game in sidebar to test stickiness/retention

Success criteria
The metrics that will determine success are:
 * For readership: our metrics will be time on site, pageviews, and sessions.
 * For Gather: metrics will additionally include contributions
 * For Wikigrok: the metric of success will be defined by operational functionality

Resourcing requirements
The proposer of this project estimates that the following resources are the minimum required to achieve this goal:
 * 1 FTE data analyst
 * 7 FTE engineers
 * 2 FTE product managers
 * 1 FTE scrum master
 * 1 FTE designer
 * .5 FTE user researcher
 * 1 FTE QA tester