Wikipedia for KaiOS

In line with the mission to make the sum of all knowledge free to all, the Inuka team is building a Wikipedia app for KaiOS users. KaiOS is a smart feature phone platform that allows the use of apps on feature phones that come with limited computing capabilities, hardware keys, and small a display. It brings popular apps like YouTube, Twitter and WhatsApp to users who wouldn’t be able to afford a smartphone.

With data showing that KaiOS has over 100 million devices shipped around the world and the most growth in India so far, with the JioPhone, the team ran in India to understand why and how these users use these phones. We learnt that users chose to purchase these phones due to their affordability while allowing access to apps like smartphones do. You can access the research here.

Design challenge
KaiOS phones have a small, 2.8 inch display, non-touch screen. In designing the app, we had to consider how we would present information from Wikipedia on the small screen size in a way that would provide a good reading experience for the target audience.

For the first version, the team wanted to make sure that users would be able to read and search for Wikipedia articles in their language of choice. In the design and engineering, we considered how users will first be introduced to Wikipedia, how they discover articles, and how they navigate easily within article.

Onboarding flow
Research showed that and other parts of Emerging Markets, there is low awareness of Wikipedia. We wanted to focus the onboarding experience on defining what Wikipedia is in simple language to a user who may or may not have used Wikipedia before.

Page by page scrolling
Wikipedia articles, at least the really good ones, are relatively long. In our research, users indicated that they found it frustrating to scroll down with the hardware keys as it needed many key presses. We have introduced page by page scrolling, that allows a user to read the article as if they were reading a book, rather than scrolling pixel by pixel.

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Language choice and selection
Research has also shown that it is not easy to discover the languages that Wikipedias are available in, particularly in Emerging Markets. We have placed the option to change language where a reader can always see it.

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Table of contents
Similar to the Android and iOS apps for Wikipedia, we wanted to give users the functionality to be able to quickly switch to the sections of interest within an article

Article Quick links
At the start of an article, we provided quick links for users to choose how they would like to navigate - they can choose to:


 * see the sections of an article,
 * read quick facts (which is the content of the infobox),
 * See a gallery of images in an article
 * Switch the language of the article
 * Go directly to read the article summary

Edit functionality
For the first version, the app does not support editing. Editing articles in the form factor of the KaiOS phone is complex, time-consuming and likely to lead to errors. We are following the work of other teams at WMF, who are working on allowing micro contributions through phones, and will re-assess how to provide editing capability in future releases.

Known issues
The following limitations and known issues apply to the first release, V 1.0.0:


 * RTL languages are not yet fully supported. Will be supported for the next release
 * Tables do not display well