Account creation user experience

This is documentation for the editor engagement experiments team's work on the account creation process.

Background and rationale
The goal of the editor engagement experiments team is to gather data about how to attract and retain new Wikipedia editors. While improvements to the account creation process are not strictly experiments – we are not testing a hypothesis – they are nonetheless necessary precursors for any attempts to run experiments that require new contributors creating an account. If people interested in contributing have a frustrating experience during registration, then any attempts to encourage them to become Wikipedians may fail even if we provide better editing tools. In more scientific terms, a substandard signup process is a confounding factor in many, if not most, of the potential experiments to increase engagement. Moreover, improving the usability of the registration process is certain to have positive effects on other Wikimedia engineering projects, if not the encyclopedia as a whole.

User stories
As a Wikipedia reader, I want to know why I should register an account. Note: we are not currently serving this user need. There may be tangential benefits to readers or ways to user tools like watchlists to serve reader interests, but in reality, accounts are assumed to be for editors. Filling this gap in our strategy is outside the scope of this project.

As an anonymous editor, I want to know what the benefits are to registering an account, so that I can decide whether I need one.

As someone who has decided to join Wikipedia, I need to be able to register quickly so that I can move on to contributing.

As a Wikipedia administrator, I need to make sure that new accounts registered don't violate our community policy on user names.

Current


In addition to a CAPTCHA and fields for username, password, email, the MediaWiki messages that are currently part of the Create Account page include:


 * Fancycaptcha-createaccount, which includes extensive descriptions of the policies and practices around account creation
 * Prefs-help-email, which describes the optional email field
 * Prefs-help-email-others, also describes the optional email field
 * Signupend, links to Help:Logging in

Proposed (version 1)
The new version which will be A/B tested against the current English Wikipedia account creation page (described above) should strive to make it easier to register by...


 * removing or reducing text wherever possible
 * aligning and restyling page elements to indicate their function and importance (e.g. by increasing the size of the "create account" button)
 * more clearly indicating what is required and what is optional
 * rewriting text to be easier to understand (e.g. simply calling the page "Create Account" rather than "Log in / create account" )
 * reducing the number of MediaWiki messages used in the page


 * Requirements
 * 1) Text describing required fields is no more than 12 words in length (the arbitrary word budget may be optimized in future tests)
 * 2) Color usage matches the currently proposed guidelines
 * 3) All form fields are validated before the user is allowed to submit their account details for registration. If validation fails, the error is indicated on the page without the need for refreshing or resubmitting the entire form.
 * 4) Registration should work without JavaScript. The experience should degrade gracefully, so that the same confirmation and error messages should be produced, but on submission of the entire form instead of using live updates.


 * Optional
 * 1) The password field includes a strength indicator.
 * 2) The chosen username is tested against several qualitative heuristics outlined in the local Wikipedia username policy (e.g. contains a brand name or notable person's name). See /Usernames for requirements.
 * 3) A concise list of the benefits of registration is present on the page. See /Benefits of signing up for drafts.

Technical documentation
This A/B test is an experiment, but with an eye toward permanent improvements to the account creation process. The following infrastructure has been used or can be used to refactor the registration page, and should be considered when choosing how to implement the user experience described above.

Usercreate.php
Generates the current HTML forms. Not documented anywhere on MediaWiki.org. Probably requires complete rewrite.

Account Creation Improvement Project / CustomUserSignup extension
The Account Creation Improvement Project in 2011 had similar goals. Extension:CustomUserSignup was developed in 2011 to A/B test changes to account creation. As of July 2012, this extension is still active on en wiki, but only for the user flow ''Log in > Don't have an account? Create one''. To see the different experiences, append  to the URL query string, replacing the number to see the different campaigns.

TODO: turn off this extension and remove it. It duplicates functionality of Extension:E3 Experiments and the code is not best suited to our needs for this project.

SignupAPI extension
This was a Google Summer of Code project to improve the signup experience and develop an API, per the description at Requests for comment/Account creation. It's in Extension:SignupAPI; the code was recently blanked out in git for code review, there are code review comments in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/8002/

TODO: Evaluate current status of Signup API, develop spec for it. In process in subpage /SignupAPI.

Data collection and analysis
See Meta