I was hoping to achieve following goals

1. Give a reason to sign up, a little motivation for doing an action
2. Expose the sign up form to change the perception. signing sounds like a tedious task, if we can take the weight off it would be encouraging to do this.

cons
Two competing actions, we can make "get started" a secondary action

pros
Gives an explicit reason to sign up
Prominent

Note: we can do way better job at designing this page but given constraints, i think we can at least make not broken :)

Looks great!

I assume clicking "Get Started" will take the user to the full create account form with the username pre-filled?

This could help shorten the signup process, if the username validation check is done on pageload. Given that validation is server side after the user submits today, this could save a step if they need to change it (because it's already taken, etc.)

This could help shorten the signup process, if the username validation check is done on pageload

Exactly. the sign up page will load with message "This user is available" or not.

^ this is what it looks like
We will also have to change the title of this message to something less scary :)

I assume clicking "Get Started" will take the user to the full create account form with the username pre-filled?

yes

Ping. This is still fugly and broken looking.

I'll note that T85853: Convert MW core login/create account pages to Codex (Special:UserLogin / Special:CreateAccount) will change how the form looks quite a bit when it's done. There are some screenshots of the (incomplete, buggy) change at T85853#2230501 and T85853#2497833. It's not a priority for anyone, so I don't have a timeline for when it's done, but it might happen in a month or so.

@matmarex I don't think there is any UI change from those comments. looking at Before and After. If i'm not wrong it's more about moving from mwui to oojs and keeping the interface same?

This task is about changing the interface on Sign in page.

No big changes are planned (I think the biggest one is increasing the width of the form a bit), but there will be many small ones (where the current standard of OOjs UI interfaces differs slightly from the old MW-UI standard). I'm just letting you know that it's something that's happening, so that you don't get surprised when it changes and designs for this task need updating.

Note that both the login and signup form are dynamically generated and their contents depend on installed extensions and site customizations. So while it is easy to make side-by-side forms look nicely symmetric on paper, there is no guarantee it would look like that in practice.

Also, design that tries to subvert standard framework elements instead of using them normally (such as the double h1 thing) tends to deteriorate when changes to those elements happen and no one has the time to monitor the places where they have been used in unusual ways.

Any current brokenness could be fixed more quickly and straightforwardly within the bounds of the current design (regardless of whether the form gets redesigned later or not) if the task were more specific about what needs to changed.