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Readers/Reader Growth/Mobile page previews

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As reading experiences continue to shift toward convenience and connection, we want to ensure that the mobile experience of reading Wikipedia allows for easy, intuitive, and clear article navigation.

As part of that goal, we want to test Mobile Page Previews — a pop-up bottom sheet that appears when a reader taps a blue link, showing the thumbnail, lead paragraph, and an option to open the article — on mobile web article pages. Page Previews already exist on the Wikipedia desktop experience and both mobile apps. We want to test to see if they’re useful for the mobile web reading experience as well.

This is an experiment: we will deliver it to a subset of readers via an A/B test, collect usage data for approximately one month, and then turn the experiment off. If results are encouraging, a follow-up project may scale the feature to production. This work is tracked on Phabricator at T418812.

Background

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As mentioned above, Page Previews (Popups) has been a successful desktop feature for years, showing a tooltip-style preview with a thumbnail and lead paragraph when the reader hovers over a link. They were intended to help readers understand a word or concept within the context of the subject they are reading without having to open multiple tabs or leave the original article. Mobile web currently has no equivalent — tapping a link navigates you away to that article immediately.

By reducing the cost of exploration of a link and allowing readers to gain context without navigating away from their original topic, Mobile Page Previews may make it easier for casual readers to get an overview of an article before deciding whether or not to browse to it. We expect this benefit to hold on mobile, where it’s suboptimal and clunky to read from multiple tabs in one session.

The mobile apps have their own page preview implementations and have seen positive feedback, suggesting this experience is useful for readers on small screens. For example, the version of this feature on the Android app led to a 20% increase in links clicked per page in September 2015. This experiment would test bringing a similar experience to mobile web, using a bottom sheet pattern appropriate for touch interaction rather than the desktop hover-triggered tooltip.

Hypothesis

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If we test adding Page Previews on Minerva, we will see practically significant improvement to logged-out reader retention.

Experimentation

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  • Type: A/B test via the Test Kitchen framework within the ReaderExperiments extension
  • Duration: ~1 month of data collection
  • Target wikis: ar, en, it, fr, pl, vi
  • Audience: Logged-out mobile readers
  • Control: Current experience (tapping a link navigates immediately)
  • Treatment: Bottom sheet preview on link tap

Design

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Design mock for mobile page previews, showing what it might look like to upon first clicking a blue link in an article.

The user flow would be as follows:

  1. Reader is viewing an article on mobile web
  2. Reader taps a blue link in the article body
  3. Instead of navigating immediately, a bottom sheet slides up showing:
    1. Page image (thumbnail) where available
    2. Article title
    3. Article lead, truncated if needed
    4. "Open article" button to navigate to the full article
  4. Reader can dismiss by tapping the X button or tapping outside the sheet
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