User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/How FANDOM's mobile skin has changed in 2018/@comment-25356303-20180831181420/@comment-20644-20180905010030

While the sentiment that more edits are better than fewer edits is true, when we looked into the mobile contribution data we saw some pretty staggering numbers.

First, for context, about 5% of total edits came from the mobile editor. So while we certainly welcomed those contributions, it was an overall very small percentage of edits to the site. Even when you take View Full Site editing into account, mobile editing still only accounts for about 8.5% of total edits. That’s despite the fact that around 60% of all users are on mobile.

The staggering number came when we looked at how many people click Edit vs how many click Publish. Of all the times users opened the mobile editor, only 7.36% of those cases led to a saved contribution. Contrast that with desktop, where that number is 47%. That made it pretty clear to us that the mobile editor left a lot to be desired and just wasn’t working well enough to continue using it.

So with Mobile Modernization, we felt we had the opportunity to recognize that mobile editing was too difficult and that by removing it we could optimize the mobile experience. Given that a lot of people were clicking Edit but over 92% of them were turned away by a bad experience, from a design perspective it worked against content discovery by cluttering the page and distracting attention from something other than the content people are there to consume.

Removing a contribution method is not something we like doing, but given that it was a subpar contribution method we felt it was the right move until we have something better. We’d rather have no mobile edit button than a frustrating and difficult one that results in nearly 93% of attempted edits being unsuccessful.