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.)