Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer tasks

I was made aware of what's called "version 1.2" here and started playing around with the two prototypes. I would love to give some feedback. Overall, I think the prototypes are very well designed. All guidance, what to do where, when, and how, all this is very well picked. I'm looking forward to see how this performs! However, I might have a few nitpicks. Please forgive me if I'm poking at details that are specific to the prototype and not meant to be like this in the later product.

• There is the sentence "Help make English Wikipedia better for its ~8B readers each month" at the bottom of the list of suggested edits. Not only is this corporate speech I personally do not like. It's misleading. The edits we ask these newcomers to do are not going to reach "~8B readers each month". It's not fair to suggest this.
• For some reason the cards in the "suggested edits" list do have an ✕ button in the upper right corner. I believe this is a mistake.
• I love that the cards resemble how PagePreviews already look like.
• Having an actual page view count is a superb idea. However, I wonder why you decided to use a "60 days" period? I find this surprising. In my experience it's more common to talk about 30 days periods, or a year.
• There is a little sequence of 3 "quick start tips". These panels advance automatically after (I believe) 10 seconds. I find this quite distracting. It's the largest animated element on the page, way larger than the flashing dot on the edit button. Chances are high it advances either to early or to late. I'm just trying to read the text – and get interrupted. I'm just trying to find a button to advance to the next tip – and get interrupted.
• It's not obvious the 3 little numbers are meant to be buttons. Later, there is another UI element that looks like "← 1 / 5 →". I feel this would not only fit better, it would also help reducing the number of different UI elements. There is quite a lot going on in these prototypes.
• There is one detail in the "← 1 / 5 →" UI I find distracting: When I click, the button I just clicked scrolls away along with the content, and another pair of buttons scrolls into view. Not only is this conceptually confusing. It should behave like one pair of buttons. The channel buttons on my TV's remote also don't scroll away when I switch channels. The current animation also makes it impossible to fast-forward.
• On mobile, there is a screen with the sentence "Ready? Click the edit pencil icon to start" at the very bottom. But since this is mobile, the edit UI is not visible the same time. What's visible is this icon, which also shows an "edit pencil", but can not be clicked. I guess the sentence after "Ready?" needs to be rephrase on mobile, or the icon be changed or removed.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for taking time to review and leave comments on the prototypes @Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE). Apologies it has taken so long to reply, but please see my responses below.

• There is the sentence "Help make English Wikipedia better for its ~8B readers each month" at the bottom of the list of suggested edits. Not only is this corporate speech I personally do not like. It's misleading. The edits we ask these newcomers to do are not going to reach "~8B readers each month". It's not fair to suggest this.
  • We wanted this to express the sentiment to users that every small improvement helps to make their Wikipedia language better. I understand this may come across slightly as pandering to commercial appeal, but we do use real page view counts (with rounding) for the specific projects so as not to mislead with enwiki numbers. So for example, on cswiki right now, it shows the number as 1M daily users. Also the period was changed to daily due to the pageview extension not supporting counts of monthly or hourly. Here's the phab task detailing how we included the figures if you'd like to know more: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T236050

• For some reason the cards in the "suggested edits" list do have an ✕ button in the upper right corner. I believe this is a mistake.
  • Ah yes, thanks for noticing. The idea for the ✕ button is to allow users to remove suggestions they don't like, but we are not yet doing this on Suggested edits right now.

• I love that the cards resemble how PagePreviews already look like.
  • Thanks :D

• Having an actual page view count is a superb idea. However, I wonder why you decided to use a "60 days" period? I find this surprising. In my experience it's more common to talk about 30 days periods, or a year.
  • Agree and I've filed this task T248636 to amend the period from 60 to 30 days.

• There is a little sequence of 3 "quick start tips". These panels advance automatically after (I believe) 10 seconds. I find this quite distracting. It's the largest animated element on the page, way larger than the flashing dot on the edit button. Chances are high it advances either to early or to late. I'm just trying to read the text – and get interrupted. I'm just trying to find a button to advance to the next tip – and get interrupted.
  • This may be a limitation of the prototype as I think the actual auto-advance behaviour designed addresses your concerns. The intention (detailed in T244541) is that the tips auto-advance every five seconds, but only until the user interacts with the panel in some way. Once the user interacts with the panel, the tips stay on whichever one they were on when the user interacted.

• It's not obvious the 3 little numbers are meant to be buttons. Later, there is another UI element that looks like "← 1 / 5 →". I feel this would not only fit better, it would also help reducing the number of different UI elements. There is quite a lot going on in these prototypes.
  • We decided to go with numbered tabs in the end instead of previous/back arrows mainly as the hypothesis is that people can navigate faster across the different tips without having to tap prev/next multiple times. It is also a visual signal that there are only a limited number of tips so as to not overwhelm users with too much detail.

• On mobile, there is a screen with the sentence "Ready? Click the edit pencil icon to start" at the very bottom. But since this is mobile, the edit UI is not visible the same time. What's visible is this icon, which also shows an "edit pencil", but can not be clicked. I guess the sentence after "Ready?" needs to be rephrase on mobile, or the icon be changed or removed.
  • Yes, the mobile copy is different and asks the users to tap on the edit pencil instead.

Thank you again for taking time to give feedback! And please consider subscribing to our team's newsletter to keep updated on when we work on other new experimental features, including the release of the first version of this guidance panel.

Thanks a lot for the detailed response! This sounds really good. Very much appreciated! However, I do have a few minor points I would like to bring up again:

• […] every small improvement helps to make their Wikipedia language better.
  Than why not just say that? My point was not how exact the number is. Every wording that uses accumulated page impressions of thousands of pages to justify an edit on a single page is misleading. It's not fair to suggest that the edit the user is going to make will reach thousands of users.
• We decided to go with numbered tabs […] hypothesis is that people can navigate faster across the different tips […]
  How is this relevant? All I see are numbers. I don't know what these numbered tabs contain. How is it relevant to be able to quickly navigate to a specific number?

Hi again! Let me try to address your additional points as best as I can.

• Than why not just say that? My point was not how exact the number is. Every wording that uses accumulated page impressions of thousands of pages to justify an edit on a single page is misleading. It's not fair to suggest that the edit the user is going to make will reach thousands of users.
  • It sounds like your objection is this number misleads users to thinking their single edit will be seen at the magnitude of the project level views – do I understand that correctly? If so, I want to stress that is really not the intention. This is why we are showing the page views on each suggested edit article (see example at F31736797), and also showing them the views on the any article page with their contributions after they've contributed (see example at F31736801).
  • As for why include the project-level views in that sentence at all? Besides it giving users an impression of the overall audience size for each project; including a specific number in my opinion gives more resonance to the generic sentiment of "every little bit counts". That said, we could consider changing this in future to another number such as number of articles on the wiki (similar to the portal page). This would be a product consideration for @MMiller_(WMF) to weigh in on.
• How is this relevant? All I see are numbers. I don't know what these numbered tabs contain. How is it relevant to be able to quickly navigate to a specific number?
  • There are two main scenarios that this design is meant to help with users more efficiently navigate across tips. The first is when a user has read through some tips, say 1-5 of 7 tips. Using these tabs, they can then easily go back to tip 1 without having to tap a previous arrow to go back through 4,3, and 2. The second scenario is if users do not touch the panel but see the auto-advancing tips. Here, having the tabs change to active state helps draw user attention to the different tips being shown, and again allows the user who has been auto-advanced to tip #5 (perhaps they had not noticed the panel until then) to quickly go back to review the tips from #1 in one tap. While I hope this helps explain the decision to go with tabs over arrows in this first iteration of guidance, I want to stress that we will keep your points in mind when we review user feedback on both the auto-advance behaviour and tabs, in case either are a source of annoyance or confusion.

Thank you so much for these detailed thoughts, @Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE). They are coming at just the right time, because our designer, @RHo (WMF), is in the middle of finalizing this work. We're going into a week of intensive meetings, and she'll get back to you after that.