Onboarding new Wikipedians

Work by the editor engagement experiments team to get new registered Wikipedians to quickly become productive members of the community.

Background
As a follow-up to our work improving the account creation user experience, we have decided to focus on increasing the number of registered accounts that contribute and reach their fifth edit. There is more on that at our prioritization notes.

Getting people up to speed in an organization or community is often called "onboarding". It is a term borrowed from human resources departments, but is now a very common piece of the user experience design parlance. The alternative to providing an onboarding experience is simply to dump new editors on Wikipedia and hope they find their way around the basics.

User experience
While it is standard for other applications to encourage people to fill out things like profiles or complete a checklist of tasks before using their product, the Wikipedia way is to encourage people to focus on contributing content. The current behavior pattern of successful new Wikipedians matches this; of registered users who do complete an edit, the majority do so within an hour of registration.

Goals and related personas
Since our goal is to increase the number of editors, the question that follows is who is registering and what kind of editing task might they want to complete? To help guide our work related account creation and any onboarding experience immediately afterward, we've created four personas for users. By mapping newly-registered Wikipedians on a spectrum of their interest and experience with editing, as well as what kind of objective they have, we were able to better understand what the primary elements of an onboarding experience should be.

Our two goals for onboarding are...


 * 1) Help editors accomplish their immediate objective, if they have one.
 * 2) For users without a task in mind, get them to contribute something useful right away.

Other onboarding tactics might involve helping users develop social connections or find help, or alternatively, get users to complete tasks such as profile completion prior to making any kind of substantive contribution to the encyclopedia. However, our strategic approach to onboarding new Wikipedians is to start with the hypothesis that the best way to get new users to contribute is ask them up front, and provide whatever help is necessary.

Current (MediaWiki default)
In the MediaWiki default, there is little to no direction given to new registered users immediately after they join, other than a link to user preferences, other projects, and the internal referrer that brought the user to account creation. It looks like...



For the people who already know what they want to accomplish as editors, at least in the immediate future, this lack of onboarding is not necessarily an obstacle. However, we know that the majority of accounts registered never attempt or complete an edit. Not all people can or should edit Wikipedia, but those who are registering can be safely assumed to be better candidates for conversion to editing than random readers.

Proposed
Our first iteration is a test of the following workflows.

Pre-onboarding
 * 1) The user arrives at Wikipedia, either through one of the main portals (wikipedia.org, Main Page) or a specific article.
 * 2) The user visits the account creation page.

Onboarding
 * 1) The user successfully creates account, is redirected to the landing page including...
 * 2) * a welcome message,
 * 3) * a prominent link to return their internal referrer,
 * 4) * a list of tasks to try,
 * 5) * the option to view other tasks if those presented are not of interest.
 * 6) The user either goes back to reading/editing their referring page, departs, or chooses to accept one the tasks presented to them.
 * 7) If the user accepts a task, they are given a guided tour of how to complete it the first time. This tour will educate them about...
 * 8) * how to accomplish the task
 * 9) * how to edit the page
 * 10) * how to save their edit

Post-onboarding
 * 1) When users complete a task, they are show where to find more to do.
 * 2) Users are given an easy way to find the onboarding task list again.

Future work and alternative workflows
The current project largely targets one kind of user, rather than the complete set of diverse goals and experiences of new contributors. In the future, we may experiment with adding additional or alternate flows to address the following items.


 * As an alternative to the landinge page approach, we could redirect users to their internal referrer, then provide relevant calls to action, such as in a modal. Whether we return users to their referrer automatically or not, that workflow may merit additions: for instance, work on the article creation workflow and helping users who want to contribute to pages that are semi-protected.
 * Future versions will ideally detect when a user is referred by an edit window, and skip onboarding in favor of returning them to editing. (The flow above would deal with this use case as well.)
 * The current design of the onboarding page has the primary goal of encouraging the user to complete an edit. Depending on the funnel analysis, it may be necessary to reduce the number of choices directed at new users by providing only a single task at a time. (See mockups below)
 * For either multiple or single task flows, it may help users choose an article if there is a refresh or skip action.

Technical documentation
We will deliver this new onboarding experience through a combination of: Extension:GettingStarted, which will present the tasks and other calls to action for new editors immediately after registration; Extension:E3Experiments, which already logs editing tasks from the Community Portal, and Extension:GuidedTour, which provides the guides to how to complete a task, if a user accepts one.

You can view the list of messages used by Extension:GettingStarted. That goes to English Wikipedia, but the URL can be customized for other wikis as it is installed there.

Subpage /Engineering has some technical notes.

Experimental design and data collection

 * See: Research:Onboarding new Wikipedians

User testing
We conducted three remote user tests through usertesting.com to date. See /user testing for conclusions and videos.''