VisualEditor on mobile

Background
The 2018/19 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.

This project aims to improve the understanding of the mobile editing user experience, and to document that understanding so that it can be used to make mobile editing a better environment for growing new contributors and content.

This project will conclude June 2019.

What is being done
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.

Feedback
We would like to hear from anyone interested in mobile visual editing. If you have any feedback about this project please leave them on the talk page. Please ping User:Deskana (WMF) and User:JTanner (WMF) on your posts to alert us.

If there’s a Phabricator task you’re interested in—and if you feel the task is consistent with the goals described above—then feel free to file it and tag it with the VisualEditor tag. That will bring it to the team’s attention, and we’ll consider whether it can be prioritized for action as part of this project. (We may have a more specific tag for this project in the future.)

We can also be reached by the #wikimedia-editing IRC Channel.

Status updates

 * Q1 Research Snapshot - results of the heuristics analysis and usability testing.