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. Past versions of this experience we may have tested are not fully documented below, but you can learn more by checking out our research pages for each iteration on Meta, or the GettingStarted category on Commons.

The high-level workflow includes three basic steps:
 * 1) The Getting Started landing page (Special:GettingStarted)
 * 2) A task page (i.e. an article or articles) and help interfaces on the task page
 * 3) Post-onboarding steps, including notifications or other calls to action for users outside the flow

Landing page
The landing page, Special:GettingStarted, is delivered to users immediately after they register for Wikipedia. We have designed and tested a few basic types of landing page:
 * 1) A list of suggested articles (iterations 1, 2, and 3)
 * 2) A list of first editing tasks (iteration 4 and 5)
 * 3) A generic call to action (mockup 1)
 * 4) A single suggested article and task (mockups 1, 2)

Task page
In this context, a task page is a Wikipedia article we've randomly selected from a cleanup category, with some filtering to be appropriate for new editors. More about how these articles are gathered and selected can be found at our page describing the basic recommender system.

On a task page, we want to give new editors help learning the mechanics of editing and show them how complete the specific improvements the article needs. We primarily do this through two tools:
 * 1) Guided tours.
 * 2) A fixed toolbar on top of task pages, which includes a reminder of the task to be completed and a help button to show a guided tour. This toolbar exists not just to provide help on an individual article, but let's users are who confused or looking for something else to do either navigate back to Special:GettingStarted, or try another randomly-selected article.

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.