(Copied Carolyn’s post from https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/05/28/four-open-design-methods-we-used-to-improve-wikipedias-ios-app/ for testing)
Wikipedia is built and edited by the collaborative efforts of volunteers around the world. When it came time to improve the editing features on Wikipedia’s iOS app, we here on the Wikimedia Foundation’s iOS team wanted to ensure that our design process reflected that and the values of our organization, including our design principles.
To accomplish this, we utilized a variety of different open design techniques, including conversations with community members and usability testing, generative research, comparative analysis, and design reviews.
Here’s more about what we did and what we learned from our experiences. We hope that you will also be able to learn from what we did here and apply it to your own product design process.
Wikipedia is built and edited by the collaborative efforts of volunteers around the world. When it came time to improve the editing features onWikipedia’s iOS app, we here on theWikimedia Foundation’s iOS teamwanted to ensure that our design process reflected that and the values of our organization, including ourdesign principles.
To accomplish this, we utilized a variety of differentopen design techniques, including conversations with community members and usability testing, generative research, comparative analysis, and design reviews.
Here’s more about what we did and what we learned from our experiences. We hope that you will also be able to learn from what we did here and apply it to your own product design process.
• • •
Collaborating with the community
At theWikimedia Hackathon in May 2018, we performed in-person testing of the old iOS editing interface with Wikimedia volunteer editors, the power users who do or could use the feature every day. This helped us understand which parts of the editing workflow they felt could be most improved and what features it would be helpful to introduce into the app. We also participated in anopen brainstorming sessionwith the Foundation’s mobile web team, where attendees discussed common use cases and pain points in mobile contribution.
What we learned:
We created a list of requested features and used these findings to gain a better understanding of common use cases for editing on mobile, specifically within the iOS app.
Some of the results were surprising to us. One preconception we held was that users would want or expect to see a MediaWiki-style visual editor within the app. (The visual editor, styled as “VisualEditor,” is a rich-text editing option on most Wikimedia sites.) However, this session showed us that this group of users, who were often fixing small typos or mistakes while on the run, actually desiredsyntax highlightingfor the older “wikitext” editor (similar to an HTML editor).
Utilizing generative research
Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Abbey Ripstra and James Forrester created a contribution workflow taxonomy. This work, built off the New Editors research project, resulted in an inventory of 88 workflows and 500 steps used for contributing to the English, Czech, Korean, French and Hindi Wikipedias. These were ranked by most commonly utilized workflows and sorted by potential ease of use on mobile.
What we learned:
From this taxonomy and conversations with the researchers, we were able to identify a set of suggested workflows to bring to the iOS app, including expanding an article, copy-editing or re-writing, adding media from Wikimedia Commons, and tagging a page.
What’s next?
The iOS team will continue to focus on the needs of the contributors that make Wikipedia. In upcoming releases we’ll make it easier to insert images from Wikimedia Commons, get feedback on your contributions with streamlined user talk pages, and generally work to make the work flows for participating in Wikipedia on the go far more delightful.
As we work through additional user needs and stories, the open design methods highlighted here will be a core part of our work.
How you can help
The Wikimedia Foundation’s iOS team is always looking for ways to make the app better, and we warmly welcome input and feedback from our users. You can contact us via IRCor by emailing us. The public version of the app—with the new wikitext editor!—is available for download from the app store. If you’re interested in testing out the latest features, you can sign up to become a beta tester within the app.
Additionally, as an open source project, we’re always happy to see volunteer contributions. If you are an iOS developer, you can learn about how to get involved on the Wikimedia mobile engineering contribution page.
Carolyn Li-Madeo, User Experience Designer, Audiences Design
Wikimedia Foundation