Wikipedia.org Portal: (concern about) adding app download badge -

The Discovery team would like to add links to the Wikipedia apps near the bottom of the wikipedia.org portal page as this action will provide an introduction for our visitors who are interested in, or prefer to use, the platform-native mobile apps. Click here to view a sample mocked image that includes the app download badge for a mobile device.

This particular ticket is to describe a blocker, or other concern, raised by the community on the request for comment talk page about adding in wikipedia branded app badges onto the wikipedia.org portal page.

Concerns from talk page:

1. The portal improvements are starting to be well-received, with the recent auto-adjusting language items, and the highlighting of smaller wikis. We should focus on building off this success, instead of risking a step backwards. There are much higher priority improvements for the portal page, including replicating these upgrades to the sister project portals (unless that is already done), and automatically updating the article counts, and translating the sister project descriptions.
2. The readers probably arrived at the portals with the intent of searching for something, and the app-buttons are a distraction from that task.
3. The app-buttons do not funnel readers towards the wikis, which is the primary goal of the portals.
4. The apps do not currently support the sister projects, which frustrates editors and readers alike.
5. The app-buttons are placed below/next to the sister project links, which is thus even more confusing.
6. The app-buttons are harder to translate, given the graphical nature and custom fonts. Having the apps available to non-English speakers is probably a priority, and whilst they'll be used to recognizing the visual aspects of 'app download buttons', it would still be nice to translate this, too.

Consideration for moving forward:
Response:

1. Portal improvements have been well received and we will continue to update the page, thus building off of our recent successes of data collection and analysis, consulting with the community and rolling out regular updates to the page. The addition of the app download badges is just one of those updates to make the portal easier to use and to enhance our visitors experience by enabling them to discover the information that they're are looking for.
   • Translating the sister project descriptive text is on our sprint board and is is actively being worked.
   • Replicating the wikipedia.org portal code to the sister project portals are not within the scope of the Discovery team at this time. We will, however, make the code available to the sister projects if they'd like to take advantage of the work we've accomplished on the wikipedia.org portal.
   • We are working to automate the updating of the language statistics, but it's not complete yet.
2. Readers arrive at the portal for a variety of reasons and we don't exactly know how or why (and we've recently run two surveys to try and find out). The app badges are a way to educate and inform those readers that we have more ways for them to search and to find out more information within Wikipedia.
   • If the visitor doesn't want to download the app (or alternatively, they already have it on their mobile device) they'll ignore the app badges and go on about what they want to do on the portal page, which is extremely typical of any web site that has an app along with their mobile website and desktop site(s).
   • The search box will continue to be very prominent on the portal page, as it currently is, to facilitate easy access to all the knowledge in Wikipedia.
3. The app badges do not funnel readers and encourage them to only use the mobile apps; the apps are just an additional method to use to discover content within Wikipedia.
4. The mobile apps do make quite a bit of usage of Commons and Wikidata, in order to display the data that the user requests.
5. The app button area has a grey background and are apart (not in alignment) with the sister project links, so I'm not sure that they would ever be confused as a project on their own.
   • However, we can certainly take another look at the design to see if further distancing the app badges makes sense.
6. The app badges should be easy enough to translate as part of our gathering translations for the sister projects descriptive text work.
   • We had decided against using the more commonly used app badges so as to keep in line with the rest of the page's look and feel. We can revisit this idea, possibly as an A/B test to see which has more click-throughs.