Assigning to @Cntlsn to think about the design.

@alexhollender -- does this dovetail or conflict with AMC? Will AMC be changing this page? Or would that happen more in the "desktop refresh" project?

@MMiller_WMF no conflict with AMC unless you'd also want to add something to the non-empty state of User contributions

@nettrom_WMF -- would you be able to use the EditorJourney data to give us a sense of how many newcomers see Special:Contributions on their first day? I expect that newcomers who see an empty Special:Contributions will be a large subset of that number. We would like to see this split by mobile/desktop and by Czech/Korean/Vietnamese.

I restricted the query to visits to their contributions specifically. This uses the 90 days worth of data from EditorJourney, and is limited to non-autocreated accounts that were not registered through the API, and that were not known test accounts by Growth Team members. A user can be counted twice by visiting the page on both desktop and mobile, but the number of users who do so might be rather small.

Here are the results:

@nettrom_WMF -- thanks. Could we also have a denominator for each row so that we know how common the behavior is? I'd like it to be comparable to the table from the EditorJourney report (though obviously not the exact same users):

@MMiller_WMF : Sure! I've added counts of the number of users who had events on desktop and mobile in EditorJourney, to account for any users who might've switched between sites. Then the table and the percentages work out like this:

The counts of visits to Special:Contributions/username are slightly different from yesterday due to the table only keeping the last 90 days of data, btw.

Thanks, @nettrom_WMF. Very interesting how this differs by wiki. Enough newcomers go to their Contributions on their first day that I think we should proceed with work on this task.

Change 521357 had a related patch set uploaded (by Catrope; owner: Catrope):
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Add link to Special:Homepage on Special:Contributions

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/521357

Attached patch is for desktop only, mobile uses a completely different special page, so it will have to be addressed in a separate patch.

@Catrope I have created a separate phab task for the mobile version of this feature T227575 to keep things more clean. I hope it's ok.

Yes, that's fine, thanks. This task can go to CR then.

@Cntlsn on my 24" monitor, the centered text looks a little weird because the controls are so off-center from the callout. Does this matter?

@kostajh Thanks for raising this. I don't think it is a big issue, as I believe a small chunk of users browse fullscreen on bigger displays. Plus, visually speaking it kind of stand out anyway, so I guess the size doesn't defeat the purpose.

@Cntlsn @MMiller_WMF this will be in beta shortly.

Change 521357 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Add link to Special:Homepage on Special:Contributions

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/521357

@kostajh thanks, it works good! I only have a little UI note, can we have

.mw-ge-contributions-zero-subtitle {
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}

I just tried this out in beta, and it looks good to me. My only question is for @Cntlsn -- do you think that the word "homepage" should be a link, in addition to having the button? Is there a reason to have two links to the same place?

@MMiller_WMF, I guess the reason would be maximising conversion rate to the Homepage. The feeling is that, mostly on desktop, users are accustomed to follow blue text links, by offering both options we make sure they find the way to get to the Homepage (if that is their intention).
I agree it's maybe not the most elegant solution, but also I don't think the redundancy could be particularly misleading here? Thoughts?

@MMiller_WMF, now that I think about it with a different perspective, maybe having one CTA would be more efficient in terms of measurement plan. I guess it again comes down to decide how ambitious we want the features to aid discovery campaign to be?

+1 to just one CTA button as I think the potential for confusion is greater than the benefit of more clicks by having a link as well.

Change 524335 had a related patch set uploaded (by Catrope; owner: Catrope):
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Remove link from subtitle on Contributions page

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/524335

@RHo @Cntlsn -- got it. I'll make the change in the task description.

@Catrope -- moving this back to In Progress to remove the link in the text, leaving only the link on the button.

Change 524335 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Remove link from subtitle on Contributions page

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/524335

Checked in betalabs - looks and works as expected.

@Cntlsn - is it ok that the tour popup overlaps the text?

@Cntlsn -- could you please prioritize the design review on this so that we can keep the feature rolling with this week's train?

@Etonkovidova -- I'm pretty sure that the only way a user can see that screen you saw (the popup overlapping the text) is if the are on the Contributions page as an anonymous user, and then go straight from there to creating their account. I think that journey is probably pretty rare, and I'm not worried about it.

Thanks @Etonkovidova, looks good to me.
@MMiller_WMF I also just want to add that the unactivated state of the user contributions page not only serve as a call-to-action to go the Homepage, but also to tell the user what to expect from the page. So I don't think the redundancy in that specific scenario would be particularly annoying.

Moving to "Needs PR Review"

@Etonkovidova -- have you validated that EventLogging to homepagevisit works correctly for this and that the right thing goes into the referer_route field?

In T225328#5359739, @MMiller_WMF wrote:

@Etonkovidova -- have you validated that EventLogging to homepagevisit works correctly for this and that the right thing goes into the referer_route field?

Yes, betalabs eventlogging HomepageVisit table records event_referer_route='specialcontributions' (needs to be checked in production too).