Growth/Newsletters/08

Welcome to the eighth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

 * New communities: welcoming Arabic and Vietnamese. Soon we will be making a checklist for getting the help panel.
 * Wikimania space
 * Hackathon (image)

Early results from newcomer homepage release



 * The newcomer homepage was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on May 6 for desktop users. It is deployed in an A/B test, so that half of newcomers have access to the homepage and half do not.  They access it by clicking on their username in their personal tools along the top of the window.
 * After about a month of usage, we see a few interesting trends. The numbers are still too small to come to conclusions, but taking these together, we think that the usage is going well so far, making our team confident that we should continue watching and working on the homepage.
 * About half of users who visit the homepage click on a link or button.
 * About half of users visit the homepage more than once, with about a fifth visiting on multiple days.
 * Users are interacting with all the different modules on the page -- there is no clear favorite.
 * Users have been asking questions to their mentors -- but not on the help desk.

Next steps for homepage

 * Because we are seeing good reactions to the homepage from the first users, we are prioritizing work that helps more users find their homepage:
 * Mobile homepage: the team is currently building the mobile version of the homepage. You can view the interactive mockups here.  We tested this design with five users, giving us confidence that the design is strong.  You can read about the findings from those user tests here.
 * Mobile user tests
 * Link to mobile interactive mockups

Future of team in the next year

 * Here is the summary, full plan is coming. Community consultation coming.  Link to notes from offsite about user profiles.