Overview

The Android team is targeting new contributors in the annual plan for 2018-19. One hypothesis is that being able to communicate with our newest contributors in a simple and seamless way - on the platform they’ve already chosen to engage with Wikipedia on - will be a key factor in retention. We also believe that engaging current Android contributors with timely notifications about their editing activity will assist retention.

Goal

Enable a subset of notifications that offer positive reinforcement to New Editors into the app, to encourage further contributions from them on Android.

Parameters

3 Notification types will be made available in the Android app:

• Welcome
• Milestone
• Thanks

Polling only
There are dependencies that prevent push notifications from being implemented on mobile apps right now. However, in the meantime, we can enable users to see their Echo notifications in the app through if they choose to enable requesting for notifications when the app is active (ie. polling for notifications).

Core tasks

The following may be broken up into further sub-tasks.

• Feature/UI development:
  • T201429: Create setting to explicitly enable/disable Notification polling
  • T201933: Add a Notifications UI to the Android app

• Measurement and testing:
  • T201940: Create A/B test to measure efficacy of notifications in increasing editor retention in the app
  • T201943: Implement Analytics/Event logging instrumentation to measure usage and engagement with new Notifications UI
  • T202911: [QA only] Perform exploratory testing of the Notifications in Android app

Links

[1] Design brief (extended version of above task description) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZbpOlu37rOJaFEYsiqU-hJuwVC08eDF5Z6VX-FthY1w/edit#slide=id.g3f95894b00_0_620
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Android_editing_features