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Onboarding Building an onboarding process to get new Wikipedia contributors up to speed.
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Work by theGrowth team at Wikimedia Foundation engineering and product development to get new registered Wikipedians to quickly become productive members of the community. Getting people up to speed in an organization or community is often called "onboarding". It is a term borrowed from human resources departments, but is now a common piece of the user experience design parlance.
As a follow-up to our work improving theaccount creation user experience, we have decided to focus on increasing the number of registered accounts that contribute and reach their fifth edit. There is more on that at ourprioritization notes andQuarterly Product Plan.
We've also createdfour user personas to help understand the most common types of user registering, their experience level, and what task they might have in mind.
In the MediaWiki default, there is little to no direction given to new registered users immediately after they join. For the people who already know what they want to accomplish as editors, at least in the immediate future, this lack of onboarding is not necessarily an obstacle. However, we know that the majority of accounts registered –around 70%– never even attempt an edit.[1]
With theredesign of our cross-wiki authentication architecture, users are redirected automatically back to their internal referrer (stored in a URL parameter) after signup and login. If they do not have an internal referrer, they will be directed back to the Main Page. Previously, the default onboarding experience was to present users with a landing page post-registration that confirmed their account creation, among other minor details (screenshot).
After registration, users are sent back to the page they were viewing before signing up (the "returnto" URL parameter). If there is no known return destination, they are sent to the Main Page.
On that page, a call to action appears, which invites them to either
Only users who return toSpecial pages will be completely excluded from seeing any calls to action, since we cannot guarantee correct behavior on Special pages. If the user is on a non-article page (i.e. not namespace zero) they are given the same call to action as on non-editable articles, which is just the call to try editing a suggested page.
Next, If the user elects to edit the page they are on, they are given a simpleguided tour.(Seespecification.) If the user elects to try a suggested task, they are taken to arecommended article from the set tagged for copyediting. The article appears with a toolbar which describes the task, allows them to jump to another recommended article, and has a "Show me how" button to reactivate a guided tour(Seespecification)that walks them through making simple spelling and grammar improvements. Editing either the page they are redirected to or a suggested page results in aRevision tag.
We will deliver this new onboarding experience through a combination of:
returnto page after signup (and continues to implement the task tool bar and tasks)More details on/Engineering sub-page.
We arrived at this version after six major iterations. Previous A/B test and further analysis data can be found atResearch:Onboarding and associated subpages. We also conducted several rounds of remote usability testing to date. See ourconclusions and videos.