Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage/Future ideas (Oct 2019 session)

As part of the virtual offsite held in the week of Oct 21, 2019, the Growth team spent time considering how to create a more cohesive newcomer experience with the newcomer homepage as its entry point. Some ideas generated are described generally in this section of the project page, but below are some key points generated through a mini design sprint held over two sessions.

Session One: How might we make a cohesive newcomer homepage?
At the start of the session, the team revisited a shortlist of ideas/themes specifically with an eye toward which one makes the most sense to fit into the homepage and help panel next, so that it complements and fits what is already there, especially newcomer tasks. The five themes explored were:


 * 1) Awards and Recognition
 * 2) Structured user profile
 * 3) Neighborhoods and activity feed
 * 4) Mentorship features for mentors (new focus since Wikimania)
 * 5) Connecting to off-wiki programs (new focus since Wikimania)

Marshall (the PM) and Rita (the Designer) presented a background ‘lightning talk’ on each of the above themes as background/inspiration whilst each person wrote down their ideas in the “How Might We” (HMW) format –  a way to frame ideas and challenges in the form of an opportunity.

These HMWs were then reviewed and affinity mapped into the following groups of ideas (as somewhat influenced by the lightning talk themes):


 * Awards
 * Thanks
 * Impact
 * Task suggestions
 * WikiProject structuring
 * Topic/Interest matching
 * Forming groups / Helping people find each other
 * Social
 * Mentors
 * Help
 * In-context help
 * Personalization / User Profile / Identity
 * Admin / Event Management

Session Two: Move, Marry, Kill (your homepage components)
In the second “wrap-up” session, the team briefly reviewed the top ideas generated in the first session, and end with an exercise to reflect on the priorities as each team member saw it, by playing a round of “Marry, Move, Kill”. The idea was that each person would describe their dream newcomer homepage, with the proviso that for all of the newcomer homepage sections that exist or have been suggested in session #1, they must ‘marry’ (to their homepage), move (elsewhere), and kill at least one component.

Key ideas and recommendations

 * Different modules may work better on Mobile vs Desktop – we may potentially wish to include modules like social media messaging that are more mobile-friendly to mobile-only, and vice versa.
 * Help module is the weakest link – almost everyone chose this as the section to ‘kill’.
 * Combining general and individual help –   one alternative to ‘killing off’ help was commonly to combine it with the mentorship module.
 * Remove the need to initiate Suggested edits – this is something that we as a team want to get to, pending initial validation from our first release.
 * Start module requires some transformation – the start module tended to be split out from its current state into distinct parts (user profile completion vs editing onboarding).
 * Awards added to Impact – the Impact module was seen as a logical place to add awards (badges, thanks, etc).
 * Customization by communities – Perhaps there is not one integrated newcomer homepage but many different ways it can work. Could one way to help determine what works involve allowing wikis to customize their homepages to include different content that is of importance to them (for example, one wiki have many more more off-wiki events to promote.
 * Customization by newcomer users – how important is it to enable a customizable layout?
 * Adapting/Growing the homepage with the user – the idea of introducing elements like the Watchlist into the newcomer homepage was considered as a way to extend the utility of the homepage beyond newcomers.
 * Activity module for newcomers – this could transform into the Watchlist module (their own activities) as newcomers start participating.
 * Social media component  – some small social media element could be added to the homepage, either as a way to promote offwiki events, or show an Instagram-like feed of wiki activity
 * Mentor dashboard/homepage – creating a separate page for mentors made sense as something that would help attract more experienced users to helping newcomers.
 * User profile page – another common ‘move’ item was to take the account-related information in the Start module and introduce other individual ‘profile’ items into a separate ‘user profile’ page.