On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 5:41 AM, Benoît Evellin <benoit.evellin@wikimedia.fr> wrote:

The GettingStarted extension is not deployed on French Wikipedia, but we are thinking about it. In the meantime, we propose to newbies to introduce themselves. This was made by an adapted message on our local MediaWiki:Welcome creation-msg (see). Was, because since an undefined time, the return link after the sign-up form don't redirect to this message. How can we fix it? This profile creation step is highly appreciated by the PRC and users involved in new users help.

The change to redirect users back where they were instead of show them the MediaWiki:Welcomecreation-msg was made on purpose during the switchover to the new system for logging people in across wikis. (Previously, you had to see the welcome page and the row of sister project icons to get logged in cross-wiki, and now it happens in the background via JavaScript.)

On most of our wikis, including about half of the top ten projects by size, the community had not customized the welcome message. The default welcome message is pretty useless, and it's a much better user experience to send people back to what they were doing. 

Others think that even the default message should be delivered to new users, otherwise they won't know their account was created (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52373). I pretty strongly disagree with this. Especially with Echo enabled, which sends a basic welcome notification right away to all new users. 

We could reconfigure wikis to send people back through the Welcomecreation-msg. But the truth is few wikis have a decent design for this page. French is quite friendly-looking, but Polish, German, Portuguese and others that customized it are either not much different than default or are very poor usability.

The older "ACIP" project in English (https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project), which did something similar to French Wikipedia's set up, had data to support its choice of user page creation as a first step. I think if we turn back on the welcome message for French, we should do with a clear message that we're doing it because we are certain it works for many new users, and that if other wikis want this tuned back on, they need to have something at least as good as what French Wikipedians have built. Any data or information you can provide to describe how Projet:Aide et accueil uses these new user pages to help welcome people would be good for making this case.

So, here's what I think our plan is:
  • If possible, turn back on Welcomecreation-msg for frwiki, but not others, based on the fact that it's a good design and that we know new users find the experience positive. If other projects can/want to make a usable workflow that they can show is beneficial, then we'll turn back on welcome pages for those projects too. (I think Commons has been trying such workflows, and might be a good candidate.)
  • Consider GettingStarted in the future, when it's appropriately localized. In the next month we'll be working on internalization of GettingStarted more seriously, and will bring it up in a separate thread.  
Does that sound okay?
 

During my tests in order to verify that, I've created some accounts, and I've seen a UX issue. The notification badge was a red sign between to red links. This should be tested, but I think some new users will not see the notifications badge. On French Wikipedia, we suggest(ed) to create the profile page asap and send a welcome message by bot to each newbie, which may increase the contrast (blue/red) near of the notifications badge. What else should be done?

This is a complex issue, and I agree we should have much better data about how new users interact with this. 

On the one hand, yes. A small red badge is less aggressive UI than the full page width orange bar. But it's also a design pattern that users will be used to and recognize from many other popular sites (Google, Facebook, etc.). Also, we don't always want to be very noisy with notification indicators, since with the new system we're delivering lots more types of notifications, thereby increasing the potential for annoyance. Last but not least, we don't know how HTML emails for notifications have increased engagement by new users. 

Fabrice (who is on vacation right now) compromised after the first release of notifications, and agreed that notifications about messages on your user talk page were something we wanted to make sure new users didn't miss, which is why they also created the extra orange indicator for user talk page messages. If you're sending a bot message to each newbie via their talk page, they should be getting an extra indicator I think? This is the preference "Afficher l’indicateur de message sur la page de discussion dans ma barre d’outils" which is checked yes by default. 

I have often thought that some kind of subtle animation when the red counter increases would help here. There is very little interface animation on Wikipedia right now, especially not things that are not the result of user action. Others, like Google and Facebook's notifications systems, animate or even produce audio when a new notification comes in. Ours does not even update live without a page refresh, correct? 

--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/