Just to clarify, the attached screenshot is what the current login page looks like on mobile. I believe what Adam is asking for is a more prominent button/call to action to create an account, rather than a plain link.

There's a UX quality tradeoff involved in this decision. We don't (yet) have any onboarding mechanisms in place for new users on mobile. When we showed the big blue "add an image to this article" button to readers and invited them to log in or create an account, we got a flood of new users creating accounts on mobile... and a corresponding flood of selfies uploaded via mobile web that had to be deleted from Commons. The lesson there was that brand new users who don't already have a Wikimedia account don't necessarily understand how to contribute constructively, and without a well-thought-out first time user experience/onboarding, we're just dumping those people into a meat grinder. 

We're currently building out more first-time user education, so eventually we might consider making the create account link bigger and inviting more brand-new users into our ecosystem. But until we really feel confident that we've nailed it, it's honestly probably better for those users and for our editing community to make login the primary call to action, even if that means losing some potential new contributors.

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:11 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Separate note, but what do people think about having a bigger "Sign Up"
> button when Login is presented? Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr,
> LinkedIn, and Amazon.com are doing it on their mobile sites (gating as a
> driver varies by site). Ebay, and Youtube, which uses the same entry point
> as Gmail, don't. I guess this is an interesting area for A/B tests, which
> maybe have already been done.

When we launched the new login design on desktop, it took what once was a plain text link on the page inviting people to sign up, and turned it in to a green button with a call to "Join Wikipedia".

This isn't A/B test data, but we are tracking signups via this button across all wikis.[1] Looking at this data shows that many people are accidentally or intentionally visiting login and then moving on to create an account. On July 10, to pick a random day, there were 708 English Wikipedia signups via the desktop login CTA. That's 17% of all enwiki registrations (4.53K, with 614 via mobile). 

Personally I'd say this doesn't merit an A/B test to justify. Just add it, and instrument it (potentially pre and post design change?) with a campaign if you want an easy way to know how many people sign up via the button. 

1. enwiki data: http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/graphs/enwiki_campaigns

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Steven Walling

https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Maryana Pinchuk
Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org

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