Wikimedia Apps/Team/Philadelphia 2017 offsite/Offsite outcomes

On October 17th-19th the Wikimedia Foundation's apps teams, along with shared members of other teams (CL, QA, Admin, etc) met in Philadelphia. Please see the event page for more on the complete program, but here we'll outline the content shared among the team, the features and plans discussed, and other outputs of the event.

App Product Strategy
Josh Minor, the PM for iOS, presented the 6 quarter 2017-2018 app strategy overview. This deck outlines who the status of the Foundation's apps, the audiences the apps serve and value the teams and their products bring to the movement and Foundation.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Pm86vhDedmQQa_YjAwDV1i6pFpPg2pl5tQanfc9yYEg/edit#slide=id.p

Product Self Review
At the initiation of the "redesigned" 5.x iOS app version, the team defined 8 aspirations for the app. Android adapted/adopted this same set of aspirations last year. We regularly revisit our review of our own product, with each team member scoring their app from 1-10. We also asked the other offsite participants to rate the app on the same scale.

Take-aways

 * As you can see the teams are a bit self-critical, as reflected in their own self-scores compared to "Other" participants (and relative to general app store ratings).
 * In particular the Android team had a few areas where the team believes their product falls short of their own or users expectations particularly focused on navigation and user experience shine.
 * The lower scores on privacy for Android came from two sources: belief that even though privacy is important in the app, the design and user experience do not always convey that feeling. For example, "Because you read", although done in a privacy sensitive way, are often perceived as invasive. Second the Android app continues (unlike the iOS app) to require users to "opt out" of analytics.
 * Stickiness continues to be an area of weakness. Making a compellingly sticky reference app is a challenge and product theory remains far more weakly supported than other areas. That said, there is still strong team support for improving stickiness through iterations on the feed, recommendations and notifications, all of which were reflected in the planning priorities.
 * Both teams, but particularly Android, expressed a desire to have a separate evaluation of Accessibility, as in support for the visually impaired, and multilingual support. These are both currently subsumed under Accessible, but the teams would like to plan, build and evaluate those two audiences and feature sets separately. In future iterations we will add "Multilingual" or replace one of the other 8 to reflect the importance of this going forward.

App Design Overview
Lead Designers Rita Ho and Carolyn Li-Madeo presented an overview of design on apps. This deck gives an overview of the methods, recent case studies and areas of focus for app design.

Editing Features Brainstorm
The Android team has been the main team executing the "micro-contributions" strategy of Readers team, with the Wikidata Description editing feature being the initial feature developed as part of that initiative. The mobile contribution community consultation envisions additional contribution mechanisms based on the most support proposals thorough that process. Finally, although the apps teams fall within the "Readers" audience focused part of the Foundation, the teams are the only staff working on native mobile editing features. Both teams strongly believe that we can and should do more to make contributing on the app a first class experience. Given all that background the team reviewed existing mobile contribution plans and did a brainstorming and initial ranking of potential mobile editing features.

Below are the ideas generated, grouped by area. For each the team did a quick straw poll to identify items which might be particularly well supported or as particularly useful to existing editors (as opposed to the full universe of new and old contributors that novel contribution mechanisms might target). These " potential classic editors' priorities" are marked with a *.

Explore Feed Design Review/Research
Rita presented conclusions from her recent research on Explore feed usage on Android. The full deck is available here, though in the room we focused on the conclusions she draws. Addressing these conclusions in the near and medium terms was the focus of the next activity.

"My Morning on Wikipedia" Brainstorm
The team was asked to envision the future one year from now. They go to look at the Wikipedia app first thing in the morning. What do they see? What content or interface greets them? What would make them open Wikipedia on the daily?

Below are the ideas generated, grouped by area.

App Awareness Brainstorm
As outlined in the app strategy, we believe that the quality and utility of the apps has improved significantly, and that our relatively small audience size is at least partly due to a lack of awareness of the apps. Although there have been attempts at raising app awareness in the past, there has not been any real sustained effort to let people know about the apps, and why they should use them. The teams would like to see that changed, but given the many priorities of the Communications team, and the Foundations very limited expertise in product marketing, the teams believe they will need to undertake many more awareness activities over the rest of the strategy. In this open brainstorming we listed all the ways the app teams themselves could work to raise awareness, without dependencies on other teams. Below is the list of suggested activities. These will need to be triaged, tasked and planned, but it gives us a nice long list of potential outreach options:

Open Planning Prioritization
Finally, based on the strategies, suggestions and discussions of the previous two days the teams engaged in a round of open prioritization and planning. Team members proposed potential epic for the next 1-4 quarters, and each team member was given a budget of votes. The teams voted on both platform specific and shared priorities, although interestingly almost all priorities were shared across the teams.

Below are the proposed epics and their final vote tally's. Items marked with * will be placed into planning or are already in planning. Items marked with ¿ will kick off research or planning processes to further define them.