Wikiversity:Mobile usability

The Wikiversity:Main page rendered on an iPhone 4 simulator.

This project page documents the usability of Wikiversity on mobile devices with the goal of learning how we can improve the mobile browsing experience. It is an attempt to develop a style guide to enhance the functionality of our website on all computing platforms.

A Wikiversity page that looks fine on a desktop computer might render poorly on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. This is especially true if the page incorporates certain templates or uses "fancy" formatting such as our Portal: pages. The example at right show how our main page looks on a smartphone with a smaller screen. Please note that many smartphone browsers will redirect http://en.wikiversity.org to our mobile optimized site http://en.m.wikiversity.org.

Wikiversity usage by platform

The majority of our page viewing traffic is from desktop browsers. Mobile browser usage is steadily growing. Mobile app access is insignificant at this time. (as of Jan. 2018)

It is likely that most editing occurs using desktop browsers[citation needed] but it is important for our pages to be readable on mobile devices as they are becoming increasingly popular for viewing our content.

Best practices

Test the pages that you are working on to see how they look in a mobile view, report problems, and ask for help.

Test pages

Using a mobile device is the best method of testing the rendering of a page. The other tests might give inconsistent results.

Preview a page on your smartphone.
Preview a page using an iPhone 4 simulator. There might be subtle differences between various models of iPhone.
Preview a page using the Mobile view link at the bottom of every page using a desktop browswer. This will give a quick look to see if anything is broken. It is not a guarantee that a particular mobile device will render the page in a readable way.

Report problems

Report test results here. Please provide details of the brand and model phone that you are using and also the web browser, ie. iPhone SE with Safari.

Ask for help

Post a note at Wikiversity:Colloquium if you see something that's not working right and ask for help.
Put wiki markup that might not work in Wikiversity talk:Mobile usability/Test page so that others can examine it.

External links

Mobile Friendly Test
WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind)
WAVE WebAIM's Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
iPhone 4 simulator