Growth/Personalized first day

This page describes the Growth team's work on the "Personalized first day" initiatives, and contains the strategic thinking and links to the specific projects related to the initiatve. 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. This part of the project is called the "welcome survey".

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. There are two projects underway to reach this second objective:
 * Engagement emails
 * Newcomer homepage

The Growth team is building Part 1 (welcome survey) first during 2018/19 Q2 (October 2018 - December 2018). After analyzing the results, we started pursuing Part 2 in 2018/19 Q3.

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.

Part 1: Welcome survey
The welcome survey was first deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on November 20, 2018. For details and results, see this page.

Part 2: Personalizing
In the Summary section above, we talk about how this project is divided in two parts. First, we are collecting information from new users about what they are trying to achieve and what they're interested in. We're doing that through the welcome survey. Second, we will use that information to personalize the experience they have on their first day, so that they can accomplish their goals and keep editing. After collecting about a month of data from the welcome survey, our team started to talk about how to take action on that data. Our central question for Part 2 is: How might we personalize a newcomer's experience to help them achieve their goals?

In this section of this page, we've recorded our thoughts and community discussion points around how to do this. Please participate here in the discussion.

Identifying newcomer goals
The New Editor Experiences research identified that most newcomers fit into. Those different personas have different skills and different goals, and we can increase retention if we develop an experience that is attuned to the persona of each editor. For instance, if we think a newcomer is a "", we might recommend a set of corrections to make. Our welcome survey questions are not granular enough to precisely classify newcomers into personas (that would require a much longer survey), but they give us some good information to work with. The table below shows an example of how we're thinking about this. Each row shows one of the six personas, along with a response from the welcome survey that might help us identify them, and a treatment that might go with that persona to help them be retained.

Potential interventions
To think through the potential ways to take action on the welcome survey responses, we went back through our team's original lists of potential interventions, several of which the community discussed on this page. These are three main approaches we could think of around how to personalize the first day using the welcome survey.

Approach 1: use responses to surface relevant content somewhere onwiki

There are four separate ideas inside this approach:


 * Task recommendations: surface tasks relevant to the reported goals, experience level, and topic interests of the newcomers.
 * Relevant help materials: surface help documents that are specific to the task the newcomer said they're trying to achieve, and the experience level they said they have.
 * Community visibility and topic routing: give newcomers visibility into activity and editors in the topics they care about, perhaps by allowing them to filter the Recent Changes feed by category, or by connecting them to WikiProjects. Perhaps by seeing that there is a vibrant community, they will be inspired to plug in and be active.
 * Newbie forum: create a place where newcomers can have visibility into the work done by other newcomers, along with help materials specifically geared toward being new.

Looking at these together, we realized that if we built any of these things, we would not have a good place to "put" them -- there isn't a page that a newcomer can go to to get resources specifically around being new. Perhaps pursuing this approach might mean building some kind of "newcomer homepage", where they can find and access these things. This idea actually came up in the user testing for the Welcome Survey, in which a couple users said they would expect to be taken to "their dashboard" after completing the survey.

Approach 2: mentorship program

If substantial numbers of newcomers respond affirmatively to the question about whether they would like to receive help from an experienced editor, that might be evidence that we should consider how to connect experienced and new editors in some sort of mentorship program. This is an idea that has been attempted multiple times in the Wikimedia movement, with varied success (e.g. Adopt-a-user in English Wikipedia). The of "human-to-human help" is also one of the strongest recommendations from the New Editors Experiences research. The challenge would be how to do this right, and how to rally a community around it.

Approach 3: engagement emails

This is an idea that was discussed specifically by the community in September 2018: send emails to new editors about their impact, or to remind them to make their first edits, or to otherwise encourage them to engage. The results from the welcome survey could help us make such emails more relevant to the user, and speak to the goals, experience level, or topics they indicated in the survey.