Moderator Tools/Content moderation on mobile web/Preferences

Users in the mobile web skin cannot currently access Special:Preferences from the user interface. The only way of reaching this page is to directly navigate to it or switch to desktop view. Since Preferences contains critical user account features such as changing passwords, updating email addresses, and accessing anti-harassment features, we are planning to work on bringing this page to mobile.

To do this we need to first evaluate which settings users should be able to access from mobile - not all preferences have an effect for mobile-only users. We also need to review the page's design - it uses a tab system which may not make much sense on a narrow mobile device, and the responsive resizing leaves many settings squashed or with large amounts of text near them. The mobile skin also has a mobile settings option, which is additionally available to logged-out users. We need to decide if and how we can present these settings alongside user preferences in a way which is understandable.

Design
Design work on this feature is ongoing. We'll post mockups and opportunities for feedback as we progress.

Open questions

 * Which preferences do you find yourself needing to access often?



6 May 2022
We have started by making an inventory of all user preferences and determining which have an effect in the mobile skin and which don't. From this we discovered that while the 'User profile' and 'Notifications' tabs are 100% effective for mobile-only users, most other tabs are a mix of settings which do and don't have any effect.

We are planning to start our work by making the 'User profile' and 'Notifications' tabs available on mobile, so that we have an expandable design, but don't need to concern ourselves with making technical and design decisions about splitting the tabs which have a mix of applicable and non-applicable options.

In addition, we are beginning design explorations to explore our options for a mobile-first user interface.