Summary
Following the succesful instrumetnation and implementation of improvements to the language switching overlay on mobile web (T121919), the web team's goal for the July-September 2016 period is to wrap up initial work on the mobile language switcher. This work is composed of three areas:
- Moving button from bottom of article to top
- Changes indicated by live user testing
- Changes to more closely match the compact language switcher on desktop beta (which is pending rollout)
Goal Visibility
This is a Readership Goal that is committed to externally here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2016-17_Q1_Goals#Reading
Rationale
- The current language-switching button is buried at the bottom of the article and still gets more clicks than the hamburger menu see mobile report card (table name is 'page-ui-daily').
- User testing indicated some areas where users who wanted to switch languages were confused, even after our initial set of changes
- The WMF's languages team is looking to rollout the compact language switcher (currently a beta feature) on desktop in the coming quarters and we should strive for a consistent experience, where appropriate
Success Metrics
Our primary success metric is to see an increase in switching the language of the article being read, but another goal is to achieve parity with desktop, iOS or Android with regard to % of pageviews with language switched.
Note: Differences in each platform make the expected % higher or lower. For instance, on iOS it is easy to change languages while searching and select your languages, so by the time an article is reached there is less likelihood this is necessary. We have not established these baselines on other platforms.
External Dependencies
Rollout synchronization and feature consistency is somewhat dependent on the WMF's language team
To consolidate code or not
In T137679: [Spike] [2 hrs] investigate using Universal language selector (ULS) on mobile web we determined we will not consolidate MobileFrontend's language switcher module into ULS/CLS, as it would be a significant investment of time without a clear benefit.
Product Plan
- Prototyping (DONE in last phase T121919)
- Usability testing (DONE in last phase T121919)
- Identify remaining changes
- A/B test results
- Rollout on stable in waves
MVP
At a minimum, this requires that language switching within an article is not limited to the bottom of the article.
User Stories
- As a user I want to see what other languages an article is available in without scrolling to the bottom of the article, so that I can save time.
- As a user, I would like to have my likely language choice identified for me so that I do not have to search/browse for it.
- As a user, if my preferred language isn't selected, I would like to find it via search or browsing with minimal effort.
Specific tasks labeled as blockers.
Metrics Implementation
All necessary instrumentation was put into place in phase 1: T121919
Timeline Estimate
List estimates below. These do not have to be exact. These are just used to validate proposed timelines and ship dates.
| Task | Estimate |
|---|---|
| Planning | 2 weeks prior to July |
| Development | 4 weeks |
| Rollout to beta | 2 weeks (most testing will be done on small % of users in stable) |
| Rollout to a subset of wikis | 2 weeks |
| Rollout to all wikis | 2 weeks |
| Disable instrumentation once enough data collected | 2 weeks |
Delivery Estimate
End of September to all stable users