The Question: How can we develop Wikipedia mobile to increase the growth, the quality, and discovery of Wikipedia and its experience in regions and languages where mobile devices are the primary way to access the internet and Wikpedia content.
The Approach: Ethnographic field research in India, Brazil and the United States, including daily diaries of Wikipedia usage and in situ interviews and walkthroughs on desktop and mobile devices. In India we ran a follow up workshop including paper prototyping of solutions to the most compelling areas of mobile devleopment. Market research survey of top 15 languages in areas of high mobile and Wikipedia growth potential.
The Approach: Ethnographic field research in India, Brazil and the United States, including daily diaries of Wikipedia usage and in situ interviews and walkthroughs on desktop and mobile devices. In India we ran a follow up workshop including paper prototyping of solutions to the most compelling areas of mobile devleopment. Market research survey of top 15 languages in areas of high mobile and Wikipedia growth potential.
The Insights: Reading experience is suboptimal and not reactive to the variety of devices and non-English uses across all geographies (most don't even redirect to the mobile site!!); data remains a prohibitive cost to accessibility; search alone poses many physical and digital input barriers that are just a taste of the hurdles faced in editing; mobile present new opportunities for engagnement and contribution, especially with respect to photos and multimedia, geodata, bookmarks, watchlists, inter-language links, and a wide variety of features that web users are blind to; microedits have an addictive quality; photos desirability inversely related to load time. Personas and use cases across languages and geographies.
Action: Redirect DB for all devices; keyboard agnostic search; Wikipedia Zero; reading over editing/access over features; app based search, actions;
INDIA FIELD RESEARCH: Delhi and Bangalore
"Keep the homepage simple and easy to navigate to what I am looking for."
“I wanted to type something in Hindi, but could not. Then my daughter asked me to write in English and she took it to some website and pasted then clicked..and it was converted into Hindi but the sentence did not make sense because the site simply translated each word”
Keyboard / Language conundrum.
Transliteration on Malayalam WP.
Smartphone stupidness.
A lot of interviews means a lot of tea.
BRAZIL FIELD RESEARCH: Sao Paulo and Salvador.
"I use my mobile phone when I am not in front of the computer because it is not comfortable to read and write on my mobile."
Our makeshift Brazilian mobile research lab.
"I only read Wikipedia on my mobile. It does not suit itself to much more......maybe I could take some photos and upload them here and there."
"I need a search field and after that I need everything to be easy."
USA FIELD RESEARCH: San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas
I really want the option to text it to yourself.
The downside is if you try to spell a name or place, and Wikipedia might not register it...Like “Yugoslavia,” you might misspell it and Wikipedia’s not going to give you any information.
“I like the ability to type in Punjabi. I downloaded an unofficial app on my iPhone from Cydia so I could type my Punjabi poems ”
"My phone... is awesome – it can do anything really."
"With an app, everything is laid out in front of you...and it’s actually usable with fingers. With a lot of websites you have to zoom in and then click."
"Everyone I know has a smartphone...they’re supporting my non-smartphone ownership because I just use theirs to do things like search Wikipedia."
I wouldn’t look at the links on the phone really...I just want one key piece of information.
I go to Google first – it’s going to direct me to Wikipedia anyway.
There are a lot of really simple edits, to articles or people’s user pages, that I’d find myself doing a lot if I could.
ACTION
