User:Kaitymh/sandbox/onboarding

Ways to get guided tour (proposed)

Create account

Click edit

Hypotheses

people who create an account could be willing to make an edit, and need guidance to make good quality edits
people who click edit are willing to make an edit, and need guidance to make good quality edits

Prototype of a guided tour

We designed a guided tour that introduces people to editing, creating links, creating citations, and saving their edits.

View the prototype.

Goals

Allow an easy way to escape annoying tour. But if a user wants to learn:
Address the common barriers to editing: “I’m not qualified”, “I don’t know what to edit”, “Editing sounds hard”
Teach users why and how they should make links and citations
Give users an example of something easy to edit
Show users how to save and teach them what that means (discourage accidental vandalism)

Testing the prototype

We tested the prototype of the guided tour against 2 controls. Control A - current onboarding message. Control B - 1 onboarding screen with more helpful wording.

We gave Control A, Control B and the prototype to 24 users each.

After they experienced the onboarding we asked them these questions.

how confident are you that you could make an edit to the Claude Monet page in Wikipedia right now?
how likely are you to make an edit right now?
how confident are you that you could make a link within the text?
how confident are you that you could make a citation within the text?
What is the purpose of making a link?
What is the purpose of making a citation?

Results

Control A performed badly. Most users were 0% confident they could make an edit and 0% likely to make an edit. Only 2 users answered the questions why make a link and why make a citation correctly.

Control B performed much better. Most users were 100% confident they could make an edit. However, most users said they were 0% likely to actually make an edit right now.

Only 2 users answered the questions why make a link and why make a citation correctly.

The prototype performed the best. Most users were 100% confident they could make an edit. Most users said they were 25% likely to make an edit right now. 5 users answered the questions why make a link and why make a citation correctly.

Full results

Next steps

The editing team will build this guided tour using the guided tour extension created by the growth team in 2014/2015 Q4.

We will test it further...

Quotes from users

Barriers to editing

Never edited - “When i think of editing, it sounds overwhelming, like adding a lot of content that doesn't exist already. I just don't know what to edit, don't know what’s missing.” What if you just fixed the wording in a sentence? “I remember reading long sentences that could be worded better”

Requests for a tour

New editor - "A simple tutorial that prompts up would be helpful, or links to important information."

Experienced editor - "I think it would be nice if some of the more common tasks, like how to add the link to a diff to a comment on a talk page, were explained somewhere that is easily accessible."

Dealing with mistakes of new editors

Experienced editor - "Most of these errors are caused as simple mistakes the user missed creating, or new users who don't know and should be pointed to the help info"

Experienced editor - “I work a lot with brand-new editors at AFC, and a huge number of them get very frustrated trying to do things like even make section headings, add citations”

Experienced editor - "We must be losing thousands of potential new editors because they get frustrated with the initial process. Also, a *huge* problem is that a ton of new article submissions fail Notability. We really need to beat folks over the head with a "if you don't have any sources, this is not going to get published, if you only have sources to the subject's own webpage, it won't be published. Here's a 10-second summary of how Notability works so you can see what you *must* do if you want your article to be accepted/survive "