VisualEditor on mobile/Usability improvements

This page describes the Editing Team's ongoing work to make contributing on mobile, using the VisualEditor, a safer, more usable and focused experience.

Making usability improvements to the mobile VisualEditor sits within our team's larger effort to promote and support mobile contributing, as described in the Foundation's |2018-2019 annual plan.

There are a couple ways you can immediately get involved with this work:
 * Watch this page: this may be a good idea if you are interested in following along with our progress in real-time; we will post updates as they happen in this page's "Updates" section.
 * Add your issues: Have there been moments when using mobile VE led you to feel confused or frustrated? Please let us know on the talk page. We are keen to know how mobile VE can be made to help you maintain your focus while editing.

Updates
29-April-2019: The initial set of usability improvements we will be addressing are now listed in Phabricator. See | task: Mobile VE usability improvements

Background
This year, we are committed to helping contributors be more successful contributing on mobile, using VE. Core to their success, is contributors being able to maintain their focus throughout the full course of their edits, a key finding of the Design Research team's Mobile Contribution Research.

Trouble is, as our heuristic evaluation revealed, the mobile VisualEditor – as it currently exists – can behave in ways contributors do not expect, causing them to lose their focus and in some cases, abandon the edits they were in the process of making.

This usability improvement work is intended to make using the mobile VisualEditor feel more predictable and safe. We think doing so will help contributors more easily remain focused on their task at-hand, ultimately leading them to be more successful publishing the edits they set out to make.

Glossary

 * VE: shorthand for VisualEditor, MediaWiki's rich text editing interface.
 * Mobile VE: MediaWiki's rich text editing interface, implemented for mobile devices.