Growth/Growth 2014/Personas (0-1 edits)

This page describes essential personas for people registering on Wikipedia. While these personas are built around imaginary people, they are grounded in the kinds of activities that are most common on the site for newly-registered contributors.

What's in these (and why)

 * Key items
 * What is the person's objective? It's unlikely that many people are visting the account creation page and filling out the form just to try it out. Even if all they want is a placeholder account that never edits, users have an objective.
 * What task are they trying to accomplish, if any? This is different than a person's general reason for registering. Since many accounts never take any action on the site, we can't assume that everyone has a specific activity in mind. For those who do, we need to understand what it might be.
 * What experience do they have with Wikipedia? Since accounts have long been assumed to be primarily for editors, each persona makes clear whether this person has edited previously or not.
 * Dimensions: in addition a quick paragraph summarizing who these personas are and what they want to do, we've broken them down into somewhat binary dimensions, to try and put things on a scale that is more clear cut. The dimensions are the following:
 * Experience editing: Reader – Anonymous editor – Active editor
 * Interest in editing: No clear interest – Interested, but not sure what to do – Has a task in mind
 * Understanding of account benefits: Unaware of benefits – Interested in finding out – Knows benefits


 * Things left out (for now)


 * All possible reasons for account creation. Lots of people may actually be registering sockpuppets, role accounts, or to use features in an unintended way (such as to suppress fundraising banners). The purpose of personas is to clarify who we want to design for, so unless we want encourage or discourage these types of activities, then personas aren't necessary.
 * Demographic data like age, nationality, occupation, or their preferences in technology. While we do have a rough idea of Wikipedia editing demographics from the annual Editor Survey, these surveys only reflect successful editors, not necessarily all types seeking to register an account. That's okay, since demographics are generally more useful if we were trying to market something to these people. Instead, we are trying to help them successfully complete the task.
 * Data about the prevalence of each persona. We don't currently have comprehensive measurements of how many people creating accounts fall into each of these archetypes. We have a few sources, such as survey data and click-tracking data on the account creation page, which can help us infer whether these types of users are in fact common or not. Part of the goal of separating out these personas is for us to try and focus on getting good data about how much we should be building features before, during, and after registration to support these different objectives.

Associated research

 * Post-registration survey of 1,398 users by the Account Creation Improvement Project (ACIP), 2010
 * Reasons for starting to contribute, 2011 Editor Survey
 * English Wikipedia registration dashboard
 * Note: after creation of these personas, we ran an additional post-registration editor survey. This survey confirmed some of the personas above, but also helped us learn that there were additional types, such as donors and pure consumers of content, who are registering.