Growth/Personalized first day

This page describes the Growth team's work on the "Personalized first day" project, and contains major assets, designs, and decisions. Most incremental updates on progress will be posted on the general Growth team updates page, with some large or detailed updates posted here.

Summary
When new editors create accounts, they are asked for minimal sign-up information and then are redirected back to the context from which they initiated account creation. This is a missed opportunity to learn what the new editor is attempting to accomplish and to provide them direction or content that helps them achieve their goals. Therefore, the "Personalized first day" project contains two parts:


 * 1) Ask new editors additional questions during their account creation process, such as their reason for creating an account, what they are trying accomplish, topics that they are interested in, or whether they want to meet a mentor.
 * 2) After the login is created, we can direct the new editors to help content that is relevant for their goals, or to WikiProjects that match their interests, or potentially match them with a mentor who shares their interests.

The Growth team is building Part 1 first during 2018 Q2 (October 2018 - December 2018). After analyzing the results, we will decide whether and how to pursue Part 2.

Why this project is prioritized
Research has shown us that new editors have their own specific objectives when they begin to edit, and if they are not able to pursue those objectives, they are not retained. We also know that new editors have to learn many technical, conceptual, and cultural skills in order to be successful editors of the wikis, and that it is best to teach these skills through "in-context" and "human-to-human" help. The "Personalized first day" project is meant to discover a new editor's goals by asking them, which gives us the ability to give them the "in-context" or "human-to-human" help that they need most to be successful. We prioritized this project because:


 * It helps us address the issues brought up in the New Editors Experiences research.
 * Community members were positive in their feedback on the idea.
 * It helps us increase our learning at this early stage of our team's work with new editors.
 * This sort of feature is almost universally common among other successful software platforms.
 * The feature can be built and adjusted incrementally, without a major investment before it starts to show results.
 * It will be easy to translate and apply to other wikis in the future.

Comparative review
Our team's designer reviewed the way that other platforms (e.g. Reddit, Coursera, Medium) ask initial questions of newcomers. While the experience we want to give newcomers is definitely different than other platforms (we want to give newcomers an optional, lightweight, non-invasive experience), we also recognize that there are best practices we can learn from other software. The comparisons are shown in this slide deck, and the main takeaways are:


 * Modals were generally more in use or otherwise a full page overlay for forms.
 * No more than 4 questions were asked during onboarding.
 * Questions were either progressively disclosed on a single screen or otherwise shown 1 question per step with clear visual indication of the number of steps (eg. via a stepper UI).
 * Multi-question forms tended to be skip-able entirely, but with mandatory questions if the user wanted to participate.
 * An optional guided tour or further help was often provided afterwards once user was in the app.
 * Friendly voice and tone - welcoming, informal language framed as asking for information to help orient the user ("Tell us about yourself", "Get recommendations", etc.)

Design
Our evolving designs can always be found in these clickable mockups, and with additional contextual information in this Phabricator task. Our goal for the design is for newcomers to answer all the questions they want to, and to not depress the number of users who complete their signup process and get back to what they were doing.

We considered three main design approaches for this project. The new account holder lands at each approach immediately after clicking "Create your account" at Special:CreateAccount. And after completing each one, they are returned to the page from which they originally clicked to create their account. Please note that the question wording and text in these mockups does not reflect current drafts -- the mockups are more for the visuals and workflows. Question wording and text will be posted separately. Our plan is to build Variation A, start collecting data, and then start building Variation C. Although our hypothesis is that Variation C is best, we will be able to test it against Variation A.
 * Variation A: a Special page containing the survey. This is the simplest to implement, and we will be deploying this one first in November 2018.  Though this doesn't follow best practices that we learned in comparative review, it is the fastest way to get a survey up and to start learning.  It will also work automatically on mobile web and for no-Javascript users.
 * Variation B: this option shows users one question at a time, and also removes the surrounding links from the left and top navigation of the wiki for a more streamlined experience. This is inspired by the interface for the Content Translation tool.  We decided not to pursue this variation at all, since it is more work than Variation C, which we like better.
 * Variation C: this is our ideal design, which is an modal over the context where the user came from.  It helps make it clear that user is close to returning to the task they were doing when they started creating an account. It also presents questions one at a time so the survey is not overwhelming.  This incorporates our learning from the comparative review.  We will have to design and engineer a separate mobile web version, as well as consider what no-Javascript users will receive.

Questions, responses, and other text
The questions that this feature asks to newcomers, along with their specific wording and the other text in the feature, is really important to getting useful data. The team is currently working on these things with help from several other people experienced with surveys at WMF. All the questions will be optional. These are the questions we want to ask, and we are still working on the wording:


 * Why did you create your account today?
 * If we understand what a newcomer is trying to accomplish, we may be able to show them help materials that help them accomplish it.
 * Have you ever edited Wikipedia?
 * We want to know how many people creating accounts may have already made IP edits. This would also allow us to refrain from giving too much help material to people who know what they're doing already.
 * What are some of the topics you might want to edit?
 * It may be possible in the future to connect newcomers with experienced editors who share their interests, or just give them recommendations on articles to work on.
 * Email address
 * Only if the user did not supply it on Special:CreateAccount. Email is important for engaging new editors and allowing them to recover their accounts, so we want to ask twice.
 * Are you interested in being contacted by an experienced editor for help with your editing?
 * We want to learn whether newcomers feel that they need human-to-human help.

In addition to the questions themselves, we are also considering what else to show the user on this form. The mockups above show that we are also considering showing some short content about privacy and some links to get started.