Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks

This page describes the Growth team's work on the "structured tasks" project, which is related to the "newcomer tasks" and "newcomer homepage" projects. This page contains major assets, designs, open questions, 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.

Current status

 * 2020-05-01: planning and documenting initial notes

Summary
The Growth team deployed the "newcomer tasks" project in November 2019, which gives newcomers a feed of suggested articles to edit on their newcomer homepage. As of April 2020, the suggested articles are sourced only from articles that have maintenance templates applied by experienced editors, which do not give newcomers particular direction on which sentences, words, or sections specifically need attention. Despite this lack of direction, we are happy to see that newcomers have been making suggested edits.

Although maintenance templates provide varied types of edits for newcomers to make, they may be too broad and open-ended for newcomers to succeed with. And on mobile devices, the visual or wikitext editors may overwhelm newcomers on the small screen.

Therefore, we want to experiment with an idea called "structured tasks". This is about breaking down editing workflows into a series of steps that newcomers can accomplish easily. Following the successful examples from Android and Language team work, we think these types of edits will be easier for newcomers to do and easier to do on mobile, helping more newcomers do more edits.