Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage

This page describes the Growth team's work on the "newcomer homepage" project, which is a specific project under the larger "Personalized first day" initiative. This page 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.

The project is currently in its planning and design phase, with coding not having started yet. Our goal is to be presenting our first minimal homepage by the end of March 2019.

Current status

 * 2018-12-06: community discussion on ideas for personalizing a newcomer's first day
 * 2018-01-16: team decision on pursuing "engagement emails" and "newcomer homepage".
 * Next: continued design and engineering investigations, beginning of coding work.

Summary
We know from research that newcomers arrive at the wiki with something that they are trying to accomplish. If they can’t accomplish it, they frequently leave and don’t come back. It’s even hard for a newcomer to get started on their goal, partly because there is no clear starting place. We can build a starting place that orients newcomers toward accomplishing the goal they describe in the welcome survey.

We want to:


 * Present useful and actionable (personalized) content, with the most relevant content prioritized.
 * Connect the content in the engagement emails to content on wiki via the newcomer homepage.
 * Make it clear how to visit and revisit your homepage (habitual place for an editor).
 * Increase activation and retention.
 * Learn more about what types of content is effective in driving activation and retention rates.

We do not want to:


 * Interfere with newcomers who want to return to editing context after account creation.
 * Make the homepage static and uninteresting after the first visit.
 * Personalize so much that the homepage is invasive.
 * Overwhelm users with too many options.

Why this idea is prioritized
We know from our research that newcomers feel disoriented in the Wikipedia editing world. While experienced editors know how to stitch together disjointed pieces of the wiki into a cohesive experience (talk pages, user pages, WikiProjects, watchlist, categories, page history, etc.), newcomers do not know how to use them together. They wonder, “where do I start?” We can build an entryway to surface the things newcomers need to know and do first — a centralized location to orient them, and for them to return to for future work. Such a page could contain the same kinds of content that we want to send via engagement emails, but in more actionable depth.


 * Provides a central place for newcomers looking for a place to begin: between 30% and 40% of newcomers visit their own User page on their first day in the wiki, even though there is nothing on it, and no particular effort to drive them there.  We believe they see their own username and are hoping that it will be a "homepage" or "dashboard". User testing for the welcome survey also surfaced a desire for a "dashboard" to get started.
 * Provides an entry point for newcomers confused and unfamiliar with Wikipedia communities, concepts and policies: newcomers struggle with Wikipedia’s policies, and are confused about how Wikipedia works and separated from its community (research findings #5 and #8). They don’t know where to get started, as there’s an overwhelming number of potential pathways.
 * Provides a place for newcomers looking for help content: between 30 and 40% of newcomers visit a Help or Policy page on their first day in the wiki.
 * Provides a central place to provide progressive pathways to editing: another research finding is that new editors benefit from progressive learning, and have trouble discovering and using editing tools. (research findings #7 and #9).
 * Homepages are a common means of orienting users of software: virtually all other community contribution platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor, Wikia, Yelp, Reddit) make some use of a “home” concept where users start their session and get oriented.
 * Provides a destination to re-engage with users who have returned via off-wiki communication.  As this project is done in parallel with the engagement email project, it is beneficial to have a single location that users can click-through from to measure the efficacy of email campaigns.

Design
A major consideration around a newcomer homepage is where it will be located and how newcomers will find it. The team is currently considering several options:


 * Replace the normal Main Page: when a user has just recently created their account, it is unlikely that "Featured article", "Did you know", and "On this day" are what they want to see. We have reason to believing that they are looking for a place to get started with editing, and the Main Page is easy to find.  We also know that 45% of newcomers visit the Main Page during their first day of having an account.
 * Add it as a section on the User page: we know that between 30% and 40% of newcomers visit their own User page on their first day, and that the page is completely empty when they get there. This would move the editable area down underneath the homepage content.
 * Add it as an additional tab on the User page: when a user is viewing their User page, they see tabs for "User page" and "Talk". We could add a tab for "Homepage", and make it the default tab until a user has content on their User page.  It would be important to still indicate to the user that they can set up their User page.
 * Make it a new personal tool: we could create the newcomer homepage as a new Special page, and then add a link to it up along the top of the wiki's navigation, along with Watchlist, Contributions, Preferences, etc.
 * Make it part of an existing Special page, like Watchlist: many experienced users already use the Watchlist as their homepage on the wiki, and so maybe improvements could be made there that benefit all editors.
 * Make it a panel that a user can open from anywhere in the wiki: instead of being a page that the user has to navigate to, perhaps the homepage could be a panel that the user can access whether they are editing or reading, without losing their place. This might be a good idea for a later iteration.

Below is an early mockup of what such a page might look like, with tiles containing the various modules we believe would be useful to newcomers. The mockup below is not working software -- it is only to express the direction that we're thinking.