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Mobile design/Wikipedia navigation/Start page

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This page compiles ideas related to the initial screen that opens when the mobile site is accessed or the apps are opened.

  • A user recently suggested that when opening the app, the initial page should show the search bar and the list of saved pages only. This approach was taken recently in our J2ME app, which shows the search bar and bookmarks. The benefit of this is that users who are not interested in the normal main page content can go directly to things they want to do. Also see "Content spinner" below. Due to popular demand, it is recommended that the Random feature be put at the top of the list of bookmarks / saved pages.
  • Popular content - this is a new home screen that provides links/buttons to trending content. This is somewhat dependent on the ability to point to certain kinds of content - for example, the most-read articles in a given language. One major benefit of this approach, aside from easy access to popular content, is that no content needs to be downloaded initially - see below.
  • Content spinner - pertinent to the apps, to help with the issue of perceived slowness when initial content is downloading, we could use another spinner in the center of the screen that is more obviously related to content. The current spinner in the search bar creates the impression that search is disabled while content is downloading.
  • News of the Day - in the Mobile Reader Survey and in various feedback from users, it seems that News of the Day is a more desirable content item than Today's Featured Article. Unfortunately, there is no way to predict if news is available on the mobile homepage of language versions other than English. For example, some Indian languages perform updates very infrequently, and the content that is selected for the mobile version is determined by the admins of each language. This underscores the difficulty of using certain kinds of popular content in a pre-determined way.
  • Help screen - similar to the overlay screen in the Foodspotting app, this idea is to show an overlay on the first view only or one that can be manually closed with an option to never show again. The overlay would show graphically what the different parts of the UI are intended to do and how to use them.
    • This idea has the added benefit of providing a mechanism for explaining new features when they are introduced.
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