Reading/Web/Advanced mobile contributions/Wikimania interviews

Summary

Our full process and result are available in this PDF:

Overview

At Wikimania Cape Town 2018, we wanted to reach out to editors and attendees with the goal of identifying the main issues with mobile editing, prioritizing the pages that editors find most important, and raising awareness for the project among editors who are interested in mobile editing. We also wanted to get initial feedback for the new navigation for advanced contributions mode.

Through performing 30 interviews with mobile editors, we were able to reach our goals:

We noted that editors were, overall, very excited about these changes, allowing us to feel confident with moving forward with the project.
We generated a list of the most important pages/workflows on mobile for the interviewed editors.
We gathered a group of editors that are interested in the project and willing to review and collaborate in the future by giving us feedback on prototypes and participating in other user testing.
We gathered feedback on our current prototypes for mobile navigation, giving us enough information to continue with the next round of iteration.

The following round of research will be posted on this page. Feedback on these is welcome and much appreciated.

Process

Participants were a combination of people who sought us out and individuals we identified/recruited through casual conversations. The interviews were conducted in a semi-formal manner (somewhere in between casual conversations about editing and a formal user interview). We followed an interview script, although the casual nature of the conversations meant that the interviews tended to vary. The interviews included a card ranking activity (to identify which pages and tools were most important for users) and a card sorting activity (to identify how editors thought about navigation on mobile).

Findings

General

The editors we interacted with were generally excited about us working on mobile contributions (and working with us on mobile contributions). There were several editors who have been editing for a long time on desktop, have never edited on mobile, and seemed unlikely to start. However, this group seemed to be the minority. People willingly started watching our project page and were enthusiastic about continuing to engage after Wikimania. We collected contact information from 30 editors with the understanding that we will reach out to them for continued collaboration.

Current mobile editing practices

Most of the people we talked to do some editing on mobile. For some it’s a regular thing. They (almost always) use the desktop version of the site to edit on mobile. For some editors the blockers to editing on mobile have less to do with our product, and more to do with general constraints. e.g. difficulty typing on a smartphone. Editors noted that using the desktop version on their phone is noticeably slower than the mobile wiki site. People generally don’t check to see how their edits look when rendered on mobile (despite knowing the majority of reading happens on mobile).

Identify/prioritize key pages/tools for advanced mobile contributing

In order to investigate this we did a card ranking activity with participants. Each card was a page or tool that is part of the editing workflows. We allowed people to add other pages/tools if they weren’t included. The card ranking resulted in the following list of pages/workflows (from most to least important):

History
Diff pages
Watchlist
Talk
Contributions
Recent changes
User pages
Village pump
Preferences
New pages feed
Pending changes
Related changes
What links here
Help page
Admin noticeboard
File page
Special:Logs

Prototype review

We also reviewed and collected feedback on two prototypes for the expanded navigation. Overall, users reacted positively to the idea of the expanded navigation while having comments and feedback on specific elements of the prototypes themselves.

Next steps

We will be iterating on our prototypes based on the feedback so far and reaching out soon for a second round of opinions from our various communities.