User:Melamrawy (WMF)/Mobile Experience

<User:Melamrawy (WMF)/notes

Whats wrong with Wikipedia’s mobile experience?

Most readers don't understand how Wikipedia works. This is a bold assumption. But even with the counter assumption that some readers do understand how Wikipedia works, we are not doing any organized effort in order to reach out to our readers, and integrate them in our system.

A basic step towards reaching out to your users, is to

• go where the users are,
• make ourselves noticeable,
• make sure we provide relevant information for them.

We want our readers to understand how Wikipedia works. When this happens, then they can effectively become part of our larger community, and we can start to talk about the growth of our systems as a whole.

The basic notion of the more rea ders we have to more editors we will eventually have, doesn't prove itself to be true, mostly for the for the lack of actively reaching out to the reader, in a meaningful way. Making the edit button available isn't the way how you grow editors base, and help readers explore different activities on Wikipedia.

Letting Wikipedia tell its story through the browsing experience, is how a reader would

• start to belong to our platform differently,
• start to make it their destination,
• start to find different activities to do on Wikipedia.

When we support readers to understand the Wikipedia story, then they would know that this is not the link that shows up first while searching google and which is written by volunteers (if they actually knew that), they would then know that this is

• the encyclopedia written by millions,
• available in tens of languages,
• where you can randomly explore things and get lost in the new knowledge you learn about,
• or you can do minor fixes,
• You can use our mobile relevant features (which we will research and promote smartly)
• you can even ask questions on the talk page of the article,
• you can post a general question,
• or you just simply follow the news, what is up with Wikipedia recently? What are the people discussing, Readers then can engage, and become and effective part of that.

How can we let Wikipedia tell its story through the browsing experience, on mobile.

1. Editors need to engage in the cross-platform culture

Wikipedia is created by editors. They are the ones who create content, curate, and style it. Giving editors functionalities that enable them to style content for friendly rendering on different devices is a target that is based on the motivation that +50% of readers come through mobile.

2. Our technologies need to support holistic solutions for content rendering on mobile

2.a Give editors the tools to markup for mobile (or express representational intent and we can convert that into markup)

• template styles (i.e. the ability to create device-specific styles)
• semantic markup (i.e. this is the most important image, or this is the scoreboard for the game) - this could translate beyond mobile

2.b Remove editor blockers (like disinterest) and uncover others

• show mobile stats
• show mobile preview of an article/template
• warn editors when a non-mobile friendly template is being used
• make mobile editing easier-->more mobile editors-->more mobile friendly articles

2.c Additional transformations

• For example, no amount of styling will make large tables look good. Maybe we need to build something more like media viewer for tables.

4. We need to define UX readers needs in order for them to feel at home

Existing issues that don't support the above goal are:

4.a Hamburger menu

This is the one design aspect that has proved to actively hide information, not just from those who aren't familiar with the icon.

4.b Talk pages, history, recent changes, whatever that makes Wikipedia Wikpedia, barely has a footprint on mobile.

It is understandable that a reader needs are different from editors need, especially when the platforms are different, but this is not a valid justification, that in order to provide a “simple” interface, we need to render the system differently, with accustomed information that misrepresent it.

4.c The last edit bar

A good effort in trying to give heads up to readers that this encyclopedia is edited by others, yet, implementation fails at delivering the right message