Account creation user experience

This is documentation for the editor engagement experiments team's work on the account creation process.

Technical documentation
MediaWiki messages currently part of the account creation process:


 * 1) Pre-registration Login page (Special:UserLogin) including:
 * 2) * Loginend
 * 3) * Remembermypassword
 * 4) Registration page (top of page) (bottom of page) (Special:UserLogin&type=signup), including:
 * 5) * Fancycaptcha-createaccount
 * 6) * Prefs-help-email
 * 7) * Prefs-help-email-others
 * 8) * Signupend
 * Post-registration landing page:
 * 1) * Welcomecreation

Account Creation Improvement Project / CustomUserSignup extension
The Account Creation Improvement Project in 2011 had similar goals. Extension:CustomUserSignup was developed in 2011 to A/B test changes to account creation. As of July 2012, this extension is still active on en wiki, but only (?) for the user flow _Log in_ > Don't have an account? _Create one_.

To see the different experiences, go to Log in and reload until you see campaign=ACP1 /2/3 in the URL query string, then click _Create one_. Or try this

The separate "Create account" user flow in place on en wiki (what drives that?) does not "[icon] Log in"

TODO: Turn off this extension TODO: Harvest anything useful from its A/B testing.

SignupAPI extension
This was a Google Summer of Code project to improve the signup experience and develop an API, per the description at Requests for comment/Account creation. It's in Extension:SignupAPI; the code was recently blanked out in git for code review, there are code review comments in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/8002/

TODO: Evaluate current status of Signup API, develop spec for it. In process in subpage /SignupAPI.


 * Q Works without JavaScript?
 * A: The experiment won't no, user with JavaScript disabled won't be bucketed so will not be directed into the test. But account creation will continue to work without JavaScript, though without some of whatever improvements arise from the experiment.


 * Q Works without cookies?
 * A: ?? TBD, testing won't follow through without cookies enabled. Unclear if the code checks for cookies disabled or just fails to set the userbucket.


 * Q Which browsers?
 * Firefox 12 Chrome 19 IE 8 Opera 11.64 Safari 534.47
 * Browsers that fail to meet the minimum requirements will probably be ineligible for the experiment (rather than letting them in possibly with degraded experience)

Data collection and analysis
See Meta