Wikimedia Apps/Team/Philadelphia 2017 offsite/Offsite outcomes

On October 17th-19th the Wikimedia Foundation's apps teams, along with shared members of other teams (CL, QA, Admin, etc) met in Philadelphia. Please see the event page for more on the complete program, but here we'll outline the content shared among the team, the features and plans discussed, and other outputs of the event.

App Product Strategy
Josh Minor, the PM for iOS, presented the 6 quarter 2017-2018 app strategy overview. This deck outlines who the status of the Foundation's apps, the audiences the apps serve and value the teams and their products bring to the movement and Foundation.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Pm86vhDedmQQa_YjAwDV1i6pFpPg2pl5tQanfc9yYEg/edit#slide=id.p

Product Self Review
At the initiation of the "redesigned" 5.x iOS app version, the team defined 8 aspirations for the app. Android adapted/adopted this same set of aspirations last year. We regularly revisit our review of our own product, with each team member scoring their app from 1-10. We also asked the other offsite participants to rate the app on the same scale.

Take-aways

 * As you can see the teams are a bit self-critical, as reflected in their own self-scores compared to "Other" participants (and relative to general app store ratings).
 * In particular the Android team had a few areas where the team believes their product falls short of their own or users expectations particularly focused on navigation and user experience shine.
 * The lower scores on privacy for Android came from two sources: belief that even though privacy is important in the app, the design and user experience do not always convey that feeling. For example, "Because you read", although done in a privacy sensitive way, are often perceived as invasive. Second the Android app continues (unlike the iOS app) to require users to "opt out" of analytics.
 * Stickiness continues to be an area of weakness. Making a compellingly sticky reference app is a challenge and product theory remains far more weakly supported than other areas. That said, there is still strong team support for improving stickiness through iterations on the feed, recommendations and notifications, all of which were reflected in the planning priorities.
 * Both teams, but particularly Android, expressed a desire to have a separate evaluation of Accessibility, as in support for the visually impaired, and multilingual support. These are both currently subsumed under Accessible, but the teams would like to plan, build and evaluate those two audiences and feature sets separately. In future iterations we will add "Multilingual" or replace one of the other 8 to reflect the importance of this going forward.