Reading/Mexico Readers Research

About
The Reading Team was created in April 2015 to take on building better experiences for Wikimedia project readers. While defining strategic goals for the team, we came to the conclusion that it is critical for us to create reading experiences particular to readers in the global south.

(Note: "Global south" is a less-than-ideal term that is currently being discussed within WMF. We're using it here for now as a proxy, and will update terminology when there is consensus within the Foundation for a better classification.)

Why the global south?
The next billion people are coming online worldwide in the global south. Mobile Internet penetration will grow from 28% to 45% in developing markets from 2014 to 2020 (GSM Report), which is an increase of 700 million potential readers and editors (1.55 billion now; 2.25 billion in 2020) compared to 600 million total today in the global north. Our readership ratios are inverted compared to population; 78% of our page views are from the Global North and this number has been flat for more than a year.

WMF has previously focused on developing the Wikimedia movement in the global south mainly through access (through Wikipedia Zero) and editing (through grant making). That said, we have a lot to learn about the different constraints and behaviors for people outside of the global north, particularly when it comes to product development.

Through a better understanding of users in the global south, we will improve the interface of the Wikimedia projects to help readers access our content. With more engaged readers, we hope that editing will also increase and plan to share what we learn along the way with the Editing Team to help build the non-English wikis.

What we know
The global south is not a single, monolithic region. With over 150 countries classified as being in the global south, we cannot define any single sweeping characteristics. In order to build great products, we need to focus on building the right features for some group of our potential readers and then expand from there. To that end, we developed a number of dimensions to segment the market in order to narrow our focus, as described in the Industry Analysis deck.

We still have a lot to learn about how people in the global south approach knowledge, both on- and offline. In order to develop understanding for our product teams, we are planning a Deep Dive. A team of WMF researchers (a mix of Product/Engineering, Design Research, and Partnerships) will be traveling to Mexico in February 2016 for deep ethnographic research.

Research Goals

 * 1) To inform concept development and iteration for New Readers for all product teams in WMF. (
 * 2) Keep an eye out for similarities and differences between what we learn in Mexico, and what we have learned about South Africa and Ghana.
 * 3) To prototype our research methodology (and iterate for next research).
 * 4) To inform Reading team strategy.
 * 5) Observe the rural and urban contexts of advertising and awareness - where to people learn about connecting to the internet / relating to  telecom providers, etc.
 * 6) Inform additional personas to add to our set.

Big questions to explore through this research

 * 1) How are people accessing and using information for learning online?
 * 2) What kind of technology (hardware and software) are people using to learn with?
 * 3) What kind of access do people have to the internet? (frequency / speed)
 * 4) What information is most valued?
 * 5) What information is most difficult to access?
 * 6) What do people search for but can not find or have difficulty finding?
 * 7) What’s impact of having access to more information?  (might be hard to answer this one)
 * 8) What differences between social groups are there – male/female, age, wealth etc when it comes to learning?
 * 9) Do people use Wikipedia for learning? If so, in what context, and for what reasons?
 * 10) Wikipedia brand; how aware are people of the brand and what sits behind it?
 * 11) If people are aware of Wikipedia, what do they turn to it for? or why don’t they turn to it?

Research Methodology
The plan: Contextual inquiry / deep dive. Ethnographic interviews in people’s homes with debriefs done as closely after each interview as possible. For this research, we have two teams of 3 doing interviews. The teams will share out their debriefs with each other, and start to see patterns along the way.

15 non Wikimedian interviews
(Link to interview protocol will go here)

Interview, in context, end users (and non users) to learn more about their relationship to knowledge and learning, their technology ecosystems and their lives in general to inform how Wikimedia is meeting needs and not.

Non-Wikimedian interviews (the plan)

 * In this portion of research, we will focus on learning about how people who don't have a lot of experience with Wikimedia projects approach knowledge and the internet.
 * 16 interviews, segmented:
 * Participants will vary in their usage of Wikipedia from non-users to frequent readers
 * 6 interviews for each age range: age 15-17 / 18-25 / 26-35
 * 8 men and 8 women
 * 6 with unlimited access to the internet, 6 with moderate access to internet (has access but financial or other considerations limit use), 6 with limited access to the internet (use is occasional and may be dependent on access to other peoples devices and where digital confidence is low)
 * 1/3 working, 1/3 in school, 1/3 not working (some parents and some not parents)
 * Interview format
 * Conducted in participants' language
 * Conducted in participants' home
 * 90 minutes, mixed between
 * Conversation with structured questions
 * Drawing or collage mapping of users ecosystem of technology (devices, connections to the internet, electricity)
 * "Remember the future" (more description to come)

Expert interviews
We will also meet with experts in various fields who have more involvement with Wikimedia projects, especially around medical and educational work. This will include active editors, community/chapter members, translators, and community health workers who use Wikimedia projects in their day to day lives. These interviews will be less structured.

Why Mexico?
We hope to conduct similar research in many regions worldwide, starting with Mexico. We decided for this first effort to focus on an area that we thought we could maximize the impact. This location would be somewhere that shares some characteristics to the places we know Wikipedia is read widely, the global north, but has limitations and lower traffic comparatively. We looked for an area with:
 * Strong local community with good relationship to WMF
 * Language competency of the team
 * Cost to travel
 * Relatively high internet penetration
 * Relatively high mobile penetration

Ideas for product focus areas
(being updated all the time, please add ideas to the talk page)
 * Speed/Performance (in progress by Reading Web & performance teams)
 * Language switching - are readers looking to be able to switch between languages in order to get better definitions?
 * Translations - if readers are using a second language and don't understand a word, can we solve that?
 * Simpler content (in English or in general)
 * simple.wikipedia.org
 * Medical translations
 * Improving the offline experience
 * Improving multimedia content
 * Trust / content quality. References?
 * Messaging integration (off-wiki)
 * News/current events
 * Saving content for later

Results
We have concluded the interviews and are in the process of analyzing. We will be doing as much of this on-wiki as possible, keeping in mind that some participants requested to have their personally identifiable information available only within the Foundation.

Follow our process here, including a list of deliverables.

Important dates:
 * Present at WMF Monthly Metrics, 10 minutes - 31 March 2016
 * Brownbag, 60 minutes - TBD

Non-Wikimedian interviews (in progress)
15 interviews, segmented

Interview format: We conducted 15 interviews, some people were OK with us coming to their home, and others were not. If someone did not want us to come into their home, we interviewed them in a restaurant or in the hotel we were staying in. We had a protocol of 45 questions that we worked through, while also leaving room for natural conversation flow and learnings we wouldn't have encountered through the protocol.

See the full list of participant profiles here.

Classroom of Medical English students at Tec de Monterrey
We interviewed a complete class of students studying Medical English at the Tec de Monterrey. The interview was conducted in English and is fully transcribed. We can't release the video as some of the students preferred to be kept anonymous.