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Case Study/Swiggy
How we helped

Wikipedia reach the next billion users

when we did
Jan 2016 - Jun 2016
Vision

Knowledge for the next billion users

Wikipedia is the world’s go-to online encyclopaedia. In 2019, they wanted to reach regional readers coming online for the first time through their phones. They chose India, the land of languages, to learn how they would do that.

challenge

No content = no readers
No readers = no content

Wikipedia’s content is created by volunteers or Wikipedians. Since there were no regional language Wikipedians, there was no regional language content. And because there was no regional language content, there were no readers.

Rich media content

Long form content

Since new readers enjoyed TikTok and Instagram, we created a sample Wiki page with a mix of rich media and long form content. Through user research, we found that readers spent 90% of total time on the page on rich media content.

Wikipedia’s new avatar with rich media content

We converted the facts section into familiar rich-media patterns. This engaged readers and helped create opportunities for them to rabbit hole and read article after article.

From text blocks to
Digestible facts
Simple text to
rich media
Links to short
video previews
Plain numbers to
visual timelines
Text blocks to
shareable snippets
Small quizzes to
test knowledge

Outcome

2 in 1: Easy to read & easy to translate

Facts in the form of rich media engaged readers and made them stop and read. In addition, translation of short facts into multiple languages was much quicker than translating the complete Wiki article.

Testing at a national stage

100+

articles

Around the 2019 Cricket World Cup, we launched a microsite in English, Hindi and Tamil with over 100 cricket-themed articles in the new visually rich fact format. We tested our hypothesis — that rich media content would engage readers — at scale.

5000+

participants

We measured reader engagement and comprehension through quizzes, views, clicks and time spent on the platform. The result was overwhelmingly positive — users answered the quiz correctly and spent time reading multiple articles in one session.

And...India said yes

And onward to the world!

The New Readers product team evolved into Inuka, where insights from our work are still helping deliver mobile-first, multilingual products for emerging markets.

The ideas tested and validated by Obvious paved the way for our growth in emerging markets. Working with them set the tone for our product experiments.
Nirzar Pangarkar
Design Director
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