Wikimedia Research/Discovery and usability for brand new and casual editors

Introduction
Visual Editor is an editing tool under development by the Wikimedia Foundation, which aims to provide a better editing experience for new and casual editors Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites. This page is about user experience research that has been done recently to contribute to the development of Visual Editor.

Brand new and casual editor experience in wikitext editor and visual editor
In this research, we are seeking a better understanding of the very first time a person tries to edit a wikipedia article, and the experience people have as they are learning to contribute to Wikipedia. We scheduled 20, hour long research sessions with 10 brand new editors (people who have some motivation to edit, but never have tried before) and casual editors (who have some motivation to edit and have done a maximum of 10 contributions to wikipedia) for this research. The sessions are set up in sections:
 * About 10 minutes is learning about the participant and their relationship with Wikipedia.
 * about 15 - 20 minutes is the participant doing several tasks (related to the MVP of visual editor) in either the wikitext editor or visual editor)
 * about 15 - 20 minutes is the participant doing the same tasks as in the previous section, except in the editor they did not use in the previous section.
 * In the remaining time, the participant and researchers review the participant's experience in the two editors and also review a first time editing tutorial for feedback.

Findings
As soon as the research is done and we have completed analysis and synthesis, the findings will be reported here on this page. Also, the links to recordings of the research sessions will be posted here for those participants who have given permission to share publicly.