Onboarding new Wikipedians

Work by the editor engagement experiments team to get new registered Wikipedians to quickly become productive members of the community. Getting people up to speed in an organization or community is often called "onboarding". It is a term borrowed from human resources departments, but is now a common piece of the user experience design parlance.

Rationale
As a follow-up to our work improving the account creation user experience, we have decided to focus on increasing the number of registered accounts that contribute and reach their fifth edit. There is more on that at our prioritization notes and Quarterly Product Plan.

User experience
Our two goals for onboarding are:


 * 1) Help editors accomplish their immediate objective, if they have one.
 * 2) For users without a task in mind, get them to contribute something useful right away.

In order to accomplish these two things, we need to understand who is registering, what kind of editing task might they want to complete, and how best can we help them do that? We've created four personas for users as a start, and will use these framing questions as we experiment with new interfaces for onboarding.

Other onboarding tactics might involve helping users develop social connections or find help, or alternatively, get users to complete tasks such as profile completion prior to making any kind of substantive contribution to the encyclopedia. While it is standard for other applications to encourage people to fill out things like profiles or complete a checklist of tasks before using their product, the Wikipedia way is to encourage people to focus on contributing content. The current behavior pattern of successful new Wikipedians matches this; of registered users who do complete an edit, the majority do so within an hour of registration.

Legacy/default experience
In the MediaWiki default, there is little to no direction given to new registered users immediately after they join. For the people who already know what they want to accomplish as editors, at least in the immediate future, this lack of onboarding is not necessarily an obstacle. However, we know that the majority of accounts registered –around 70%– never even attempt an edit.

For most of Wikipedia's history, the default onboarding experience was to present users with a landing page post-registration that confirmed their account creation, among other minor details. The default (screenshot) included only a link to user preferences and email confirmation as calls to action. Several Wikipedias, such as Polish, French, Korean, customize this message to invite users to instead create their userpage and give editing a try.

With the upcoming redesign of our cross-wiki authentication architecture, users will be redirected automatically back to their internal referrer (stored in a URL parameter) on signup and login. If they do not have an internal referrer, they will be directed back to the Main Page.

Proposed
The following document describes our vision for a new onboarding experience.


 * 1) After registration, users are redirected back to the page they were on before signing up (stored as a "returnto" URL parameter). If they did not have an internal referrer, they are sent to the Main Page.
 * 2) Users are given an overlay which asks them to choose between:
 * A) Contributing to the page they are on right now, if it is editable
 * B) Editing a suggested article
 * 1) If the user elects to edit the page they are on, they are given a simple guided tour that walks them through the steps from clicking 'Edit', reviewing changes, and saving.
 * 2) If the user chooses to edit a suggested task, they are taken to a recommended article that is tagged for copyediting, and given a guided tour that shows them how to make simple spelling and grammar improvements.
 * 3) Once the user has completed a first edit...

Technical documentation
We will deliver this new onboarding experience through a combination of:


 * GettingStarted: presents the landing page with tasks and other calls to action for new editors immediately after registration
 * GuidedTour: which provides the guides to how to complete a task, if a user accepts one

Experimental design and data collection
See: Research:Onboarding new Wikipedians

User testing
We've conducted three remote usability tests to date. See /user testing for conclusions and videos.