VisualEditor on mobile

From mid-2018 to the end of 2019, the Editing team improved the editing experience for contributors using the VisualEditor on the mobile browser.

The end result was a significant increase in the use of the visual editor on the mobile site. Before this work started, fewer than one million edits had been published with this software. After this work, the rate of use increased significantly. As of March 2020, more than four million edits had been published on the Wikipedias and other WMF-hosted content wikis.

Problem statement
See VisualEditor on mobile report for a complete report on the current status.

Our core metric for this project is the edit completion rate. An edit session starts when a user clicks the edit button, but most sessions don't result in a saved edit. The edit completion rate gives the proportion of sessions which do result in a save, out of all those where the editor has a chance to fully load. This metric can help us figure out which platforms are more difficult for users to use, and will help us track the impact of our work.

The edit completion rate varies based on three factors -- how experienced the editor is, whether the edit is made using VisualEditor or the wikitext editor, and whether the edit is made on a desktop or a mobile device. The analysis of these factors is somewhat complicated by the fact that the visual editor is the default editing experience on desktop, and wikitext is the default experience on mobile. This means that on desktop, brand-new editors are mostly using visual editing, and on mobile, new editors are mostly using wikitext.

Overall, the edit completion rate is lower on mobile than on desktop, 2.7% to 22.5%. On desktop, where new editors are mostly using the visual editor, the VE completion rate is 12.6%, compared to the wikitext rate of 24.6%. On mobile, where new editors are mostly using the wikitext editor, the wikitext completion rate is alarmingly low, at 2.7%.

Breakdowns by experience level can be found in the Mobile editing report. (Note for the team: Danny has some questions for Neil about the breakdown; we'll fill this out a bit more when we can clear it up. We're going to choose the number that we most care about -- probably 0 edits + 1-9 edits, using VE on mobile -- and then that's the number that we're trying to change with our work this year. We're also interested in the drop-off in the editing funnel; we need to understand those numbers a little better too.)

Background
The 2018–2019 Annual Plan for the Wikimedia Foundation focuses on growing new contributors and content, with a major focus on mobile editing. Over the years, improvements to the mobile editing experience have been done by multiple different teams at the Wikimedia Foundation and by multiple different groups of volunteer editors and developers. Due to the piecemeal nature of the mobile editing improvements, there is little understanding or documentation of what the experience is for a user from starting their first edit to becoming a regular contributor.

During the first quarter of 2018, the Editing team in partnership with the Apps teams, will leverage data and community feedback to produce a document outlining the current state of mobile editing, social challenges, define where and how the visual editor is available and define use cases the product will support. Based on the team’s findings, we will prototype and experiment with visual-based mobile editing workflows, such as paragraph level editing.

In the last two quarters of the fiscal year, the team plans to use A/B testing of visual-based mobile editing workflows and release new features as a result of the prototypes from the first two quarters. Feedback will be solicited and incorporated throughout the entire process, however, the earlier we receive community insight, the more time we will have to test as we create and refine features.

Beyond enhancing the mobile editing experience, our goal is to increase:


 * Edit success rate per period for mobile visual edits
 * Number of edits per period via mobile visual editing by newer editors (within their first 6 months after registration)
 * Number of editors per period using mobile visual editing feature(s)

These metrics are not set in stone, and may change and evolve over time. Individual improvements may also be evaluated with metrics specific to that improvement, in addition to the above metrics.

We will track the progress of this project in the status updates section to encourage a two-way dialogue as this project develops.


 * Presentation on Heuristic Analysis Process
 * Q1 Research Snapshot - results of the heuristics analysis and usability testing.
 * Process for Brainstorming - to add
 * Share-out from Brainstorming Sessions - to add