Wikimedia Apps/Team/Android/Design

Overview
The Android app and team has gone through many changes over the course of late 2016/2017. This document aims to provide background on various different spaces that Android has explored, as well as a general introduction to team practices and working with design on the team.

Rough timeline of significant events
Dec 2017 - Upcoming Fortune cookie release: Even further ahead: Other miscellaneous notions:
 * Feed improvements - New content {Random, On this day}, Customization
 * Offline Library ‘easter egg’ {T177655}
 * Black mode {T173319}
 * Synced reading lists (cross platform) - Phab tag: Synchronized Reading List s
 * Better multilingual support? - {T160567}
 * Re-evaluate navigation paradigm : Article stack ⇄ Feed interaction
 * Improve Nearby {T142431}: add search + other features, learn from iOS Places
 * Micro-contributions - extend wikidata description usage, and/or implement another micro-contribution
 * Mobile app editing features - in-app editing, watchlists, Talk pages, etc
 * Offline support for New Readers - storage and sync settings and capabilities?
 * Instant apps?
 * Accessibility review & overhaul?
 * Improve motion design, add transitions to enhance fluidity of app
 * Visual updates/improvements - font & theme options, contextual article toolbar, further customizations
 * Google Assistant/Now integration
 * IoT device integrations – “Talk to” Google Home apps, Chromecast, Watch?

Overview

 * Wikimedia Apps Design (presented at the apps offsite in Oct 2017)
 * Android Aspirations (RHo put this together to compare 2016 vs 2017 team goals)
 * Android Workflows Research from 2016 (getting rather dusty now)

Feed

 * Android Feed 2.0 deck
 * Comparative review of Feed customization apps
 * Major Phab tasks related to above: Improve Random; On this Day; Customize
 * Feed 1.0 user survey results (that partially informed Feed 2.0 work)

Reading lists

 * Usability improvements from V1: T155868 | Reading list v2 walkthrough
 * Synced reading lists:
 * Mediawiki overview
 * Survey results for Reading list usage - conducted on iOS & Android, a key finding was the extent to which people wanted sync on the web
 * Phab board for “Synchronized Reading Lists”

Offline Library
NOTE: This used to be called “Collections”, then “Offline compilations”…
 * Mediawiki overview of “Offline support”
 * User research – concept & moderated usability testing on a ‘V1’ was conducted with New Readers in India, as well as ‘Classic’ readers
 * Recommendations & next steps (based on findings from both studies)
 * New Readers User study report
 * Active readers comparative study report
 * More initial docs: Design brief | Comparison: Offline Library vs Reading lists

Micro-contributions
A community consultation was conducted in Dec 2016 to gauge support for different types of micro-contributions to potentially introduce after description editing.
 * Phab ticket {T150667}
 * Consultation page + Outcome
 * Design brief for each idea

Wikidata description (aka Title description) editing

 * Background info: Phab EPIC T145813 |  Design brief
 * Usertesting results
 * Analytics / Instrumentation
 * ENwiki pushback: We slowly rolled out this feature a few language wikis at a time, and it’s now on every wiki except EN. For some more background info on the enwiki community pushback on this feature, read this and/or this.
 * Further development: aside from enwiki concerns about wikidata, it’s worth noting this is the first addition of an in-app editing feature that has been quite successful and in general supported by the Community. It could be an easy-ish quick win to extend its usage by providing more opportunities to use it in the app – some tasks on the backlog to consider.

Nearby/Places
An iteration of Nearby renamed ‘Places’ was added the iOS app earlier this year. There are a number of improvements we can take from iOS back to Android.
 * {T142431}  Ticket for adding search to Android’s Nearby feature
 * {T130889}  Original EPIC task on iOS
 * Mediawiki page for the iOS feature

Notifications/News

 * Deck for iOS In the News implementation
 * Old Notifications secondary research by SSmith@

Design documents & tools throughout the process

 * Begin usually in compiling a DESIGN BRIEF, which typically outlines the Goal, User story, research required and main flows. [Example design brief]
 * Once the team agrees on a piece of work, populate the PHABRICATOR board:
 * Guide to writing user-centric Phab tasks with, & for Design, w/ more sample tickets
 * Sample Design feature task format
 * Sample Bug task format
 * Each release board is named after a food item for each letter of the alphabet (Enchilada, Fortune-cookie, etc)
 * Sharing MOCKS, PROTOTYPES and TRANSITIONS is done via:
 * Invision – usually preferred since it is public but easy to update
 * Zeplin – good for Devs to see redline mocks and get assets (Invitation required to access the Wikipedia Android board)
 * Misc interactive prototypes and non-interactive videos to show transitions etc on Github & YouTube
 * Phabricator tickets/ ‘Pholio’ – less common since constantly uploading images to Phab is tiresome
 * REVIEWING work-in-progress:
 * Downloading bleeding edge updates on Wikipedia Alpha to a device
 * Use Android Studio and Emulators to review patches not even pushed to Alpha yet via copying from Gerrit
 * Android Tool - nifty tool to screencap or screencast your mobile
 * USER TESTING
 * Unmoderated testing on Usertesting.com (users provided by the site)
 * Moderated/Guerrilla testing:
 * Typically uses a Wikipedia Alpha build
 * 3rd party research agencies have been helping with this since our mobile apps researcher left WMF
 * We recruited a pool of participants specifically for testing mobile apps to use for in tests and surveys
 * Beta app - Ideally we could make better use of this channel
 * A/B testing - Would also be great if we are able to try more
 * Community input – depending on the feature, we may do RfCs and community consultations on mediawiki, etc

Gathering feedback and data

 * User feedback
 * Surveys using Qualtrics and Google Forms
 * Reviews (via Google Play console for Prod and Beta)
 * Email feedback (via OTRS)
 * Crash rates (Hockey app)
 * Social Media mentions
 * Chore wheel - Every person on the team has to review the feedback from different sources and send out an email to android@wikimedia.org – Read the protocol which gives instructions on the various sources.
 * App analytics – It has been a bit tough analyzing data, but some sources are:
 * Play Console
 * Pivot
 * Hockey
 * Hive
 * TBD – there are ongoing discussions as of early 2018 to improve access to an analytics UI for those who are not familiar with running Event logging queries.