Wikimedia Research/Discovery and usability for brand new and casual editors

Introduction
Visual Editor is an editing tool under development by the Wikimedia Foundation, which aims to provide a better editing experience for new and casual editors Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites. This page is about user experience research that is being done to contribute to the development of Visual Editor.

Brand new and casual editor experience in wikitext editor and visual editor
In this research, we are seeking a better understanding of the very first time a person tries to edit a wikipedia article, and the experience people have as they are learning to contribute to Wikipedia. We scheduled 20, hour long research sessions with 10 brand new editors (people who have some motivation to edit, but never have tried before) and casual editors (who have some motivation to edit and have done a maximum of 10 contributions to wikipedia) for this research. The sessions are set up in sections:
 * About 10 minutes is learning about the participant and their relationship with Wikipedia.
 * about 15 - 20 minutes is the participant doing several tasks (related to the MVP of visual editor) in either the wikitext editor or visual editor)
 * about 15 - 20 minutes is the participant doing the same tasks as in the previous section, except in the editor they did not use in the previous section.
 * In the remaining time, the participant and researchers review the participant's experience in the two editors and also review a first time editing tutorial for feedback.

Research Session Debriefs
Brand new editors:

Casual Editors

C2

video (requested to only share with WMF)
 * he edits more frequently than he self-reported (1-2 edits/day)
 * he is a creature of habit and might stick with WTE because of this
 * says VE is easy to use, he could see himself using it
 * says he might use VE if it is available all the time
 * says 'edit source' is not the name of the editor he has seen before, and says experienced editors will be confused
 * in VE, it is difficult to know how to make the correct type of heading
 * says it is sometimes hard for him to remember he is editing while in VE, because he is used to WTE
 * he forgets to save several times

C4

Video (requested to only share with WMF)
 * edits by section because seeing the whole page in WTE is confusing
 * does not like WYSIWYG editors because he is an engineer and doesn't know what the editor is doing in the background (eg causing errors somewhere?)
 * couldn't figure out a way to confirm section level/headings, but not a problem doing so in WTE
 * confused by VE citation dialogue. did trial and error and accidentally figured it out, but said he did not like this - confusing, and it worked when he didn't expect it to
 * link icon did not resonate with him
 * doesn't always understand what the icons mean, so for him, hover text help is very useful
 * said he would skip VE tutorial because he is confident with editing
 * tutorial doesn't describe enough about editing, especially about editing in more than one language)
 * he uses enwiki a lot because most topics he is interested in are in english
 * he likes being able to see the edit in WYSIWYG because he doesn't have to click preview and scroll a lot and go back and forth as much

C5

Video (requested to only share with WMF)
 * very comfortable/familiar with WTE, so defaulted to using it
 * said he would use VE for simple text edits
 * he knows how to discover/learn how to do things in WTE
 * figured out how to add an internal link in WTE by looking up the syntax example in another section of the article
 * created an internal link in VE easily, and said he liked it better than in WTE
 * it was confusing for him to add an external link in VE; liked the process more in WTE because he could see and use the syntax in the bullets above
 * said the VE tutorial would have been useful for him as a brand new user to better understand where tools are

Findings
When the research is done, and we have completed analysis and synthesis, the findings will be reported here on this page. Also, the links to recordings of the research sessions will be posted here for those participants who have given permission to share publicly.