Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Navigation Refresh/Updates

June 2025

We made the more prominent search bar permanent for all users. T390900
Thanks to volunteer developer support, we updated all of our close buttons to match. T384845

April 2025

We looked at a few other results from our navigational changes.
- Guardrails
  - No more than 5% increase in app uninstalls (vs baseline)
    - Met - We saw a 3.9% decrease in average daily app uninstalls post feature release!
  - No more than a 10% increase in overall app crashes (for all releases after system nav vs before, measured by engineering)
    - Met - We saw a 7.0% decrease in overall app crash events post feature release
- Curiosities
  - Did overall account creations increase as a result of the Profile menu being accessible from all screens? (Baseline of 15 days before vs Experiment Date Range)
    - No, we did not see a significant increase in new accounts created because of these changes.

March 2025

We have results from our 30-day article search bar A/B test on French, Arabic, German, and Japanese Wikipedias

Our hypothesis was If we make the article search bar more prominent, we will increase the number of users who initiate searches by 8%, possibly leading to a 1% increase in retention rate for logged out users.
We consider the hypothesis supported!
- We met the first part of our hypothesis (8% increase in users who initiate searches). Making the article search bar more prominent resulted in a 23.8% increase in the number of users who initiated searches from article view as compared to our control experience.
- However, we did not fully achieve the second part of the hypothesis (1% increase in retention rate for logged-out users). The more prominent search bar group had a 0.21% higher retention rate, not a statistically significant change compared to control.
- Learnings
  - Making the search more prominent in article view means more people will use it in article view, but it does not necessarily result in a net increase in browsing Wikipedia articles (no increase in daily pageviews/user).
  - We conclude that users who are now searching from article view would've done so in another way (using the app’s overall search or using links), but this UI change makes searching more convenient for more people, or onboards them to the idea of searching from within article view.
  - Isolating a change like this into an A/B test required more up-front work, but allowed us to feel confident in making such a large change to the most popular view in the app (article view).
- Next steps
  - Because the larger search bar increases search actions in Article View, does not negatively affect retention, and aligns with our future Navigation plans, our next step will be to scale the more prominent search bar to all languages.
Next up for navigation, we will be focused on adding Tabbed Browsing into the app.

February 2025

We started the A/B test of a more prominent search bar in article view for users with French, Arabic, German, or Japanese as a primary language as part of our ongoing Navigation refresh , our work was tracked with this Sub-epic: T383827.
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:More_prominent_article_search_test.png
We deployed changes to our overall app navigation, switching over to using iOS system elements. This will help make the App feel more native to iOS users, and solve a number of existing bugs. This is part of our ongoing Navigation refresh , our work was tracked with this Sub-epic: T383827. As part of this change, we added access to the “Profile” menu into more places, including Places, Search, History, and Saved.
We began tracking impressions and sources for article views in the iOS app, to help us understand where article views come from internally (if articles are opened from History, vs Places for example) as we move things for the navigation refresh: T382032, T382031.

January 2025

We continued work on phase 2 of our navigation refresh. We deployed improvements to our navigation bars across the app, switching them to system elements. This will reduce bugs in the long-term, and enhance the native feeling of the app.
We completed analysis on our hypothesis: If we make the “Donate” button in the iOS App more prominent by making it one click or less away from the main navigation screen, we will learn if discoverability was a barrier to non banner donations.
- We consider this hypothesis supported: For the first 22 days of the big English campaign time from across all countries has seen an increase in app menu donations on IOS by 36.2%. This performance was short of what was a stretch goal for a 50% improvement for all sidebar donations on iOS.

December 2024

We began work on phase 2 of our navigation refresh. We plan to make improvements to the app’s overall system navigation that will both improve usability, and prepare the app for future releases. Phase 2 will include unifying the top navigation for the main views of the app, testing a more prominent search in article view, and moving "History" into "Search".

October 2024

We optimized the VoiceOver experience for menu changes and profile view T374167, T374168
The profile menu has been released into the production version of the app. Our work can be followed in this Epic: T373714

iOS Wikipedia App profile menu button location and contents

September 2024

We released the Profile menu into the Beta version of the App! This is the first phase of the larger Navigation refresh. Profile gives you quick access to Watchlist, Notifications, Talk Page, and more from the Explore tab, and while reading an article. Several items that previously lived in Settings have now been moved into the Profile Menu. Future improvements will continue to be made to the Profile Menu, and it will eventually be accessible throughout the app, so we appreciate you testing it out and leaving feedback on the discussion page.
- Testing instructions
  - Follow the steps to download Test Flight https://testflight.apple.com/join/Z0AU0KXC on your iPhone or iPad
  - Open the Profile menu in the top-right corner while reading any article, or in the top-right corner of the Explore tab.
  - Please share any suggestions for improvement, or report any bugs, glitches, or crashes to iOS-support@wikimedia.org. Thank you for using our app!

August 2024

Results from usability testing T351834: Two variants were tested with qualitative user testing on userlytics using Figma prototypes. In all, we had 98 total participants in user testing, yielding 86 usable tests.
- Our research goals were:
  - Update app navigation to improve feature discoverability.
    - Placement: Can the participants find the existing features in the app?
    - Do participants understand what could be found in each tab bar destination?
    - Would participants know where to find new features/content?
  - Evaluate app usability
    - Navigation and orientation: Can participants navigate to and from different areas of the app?
    - Can they navigate between article view and the main view?
    - Activity: Do experienced contributors have easy access to editing related pages and features? Do readers have easy access to reading related pages and features?
  - iOS specific expectations
    - User interface: Does the UI fit with the iOS experience?
- Our testing audience included:
  - Those with a range of editing experience:
    - Readers
    - Newcomers
    - Experienced editors
  - Users who spoke the following languages:
    - English
    - Arabic
    - German
    - Chinese (Simplified).
    - From countries: Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Iraq, KSA, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, UAE, United Kingdom, United States
  - A wide range of age and gender identify:
    - Identify as female: 31, Identify as male: 67
    - Age: 19-57
- App Navigation Variants tested:
- Variant A

Variant B

- Both variants introduced the following changes:
  - Places being less prominent (no longer it’s own tab)
    - When asked to find it people were able to in both variants
  - History being less prominent (no longer it’s own tab)
    - When asked to find it people were able to in both variants
  - A tab for tabbed article browsing
  - Inverted relationship between Settings and Profile
- The variants differed in the following ways:

Variant A	Variant B
Notifications in the header of every view	Notifications as a tab
Watchlist located within Notifications	Watchlist located within the Activity tab
Profile as a tab	Profile in the header of the Home view
Saved articles as a tab	Saved articles within the Activity tab

- Variant B also introduced the concept of Activity, which is a tab that houses: Reading lists, Saved articles, Watchlist, Suggested edits, and Reading history
- Results
  - Places being less prominent (no longer it’s own tab)
    - When asked to find it people were able to in both variants
  - History being less prominent (no longer it’s own tab)
    - When asked to find it people were able to in both variants
  - Watchlist located within Notifications vs. in the Activity tab
    - All 8 participants had difficulty finding it within Notifications
  - Profile as a tab vs. in the header of Home
    - When asked to find it people were able to in both variants
  - Saved articles as a tab vs. in the Activity tab
    - 5/10 participants had difficulty finding it in the Activity tab
    - 7/9 participants had an easy time finding it as a tab
- Next steps:
  - We combined insights from both versions into the wireframes shared above. We will plan to make the changes in phases throughout the next year.
  - Additional testing could be done to better understand how each proposed change performs against each specific concern/goal as we add them.