The Growth and Editing teams are both working on onboarding new users. The Growth team has been thinking about this with respect to a new user's entire experience on the wiki, and the Editing team has been thinking about a new user's initial experience with the Visual Editor.
The first time a new user opens up the editor is an important moment, and so there have been multiple initiatives over the years that put notifications, popups, and overlays in front of the user at that time. Because these efforts have not been coordinated, some users may receive many conflicting notifications all at the same moment, leading to a negative and confusing experience.
We want to improve this, especially because the Growth and Editing teams intend to continue to structure those first moments in the editor. The first step is catalog what notifications users are getting in which circumstances. Here is an incomplete list of the notifications that we can think of:
* Switching dialog (desktop)
* GettingStarted tour (desktop)
* Edit notices that VE makes into popups (e.g. not logged in message, protection note, page-specific notices etc) (mobile + desktop)
* Blue dots on the link and citation tools (desktop)
* GuidedTour for homepage discovery
* Wiki-specific GuidedTours (like in French wikitext)
* Help panel call to action
* Notification of the existence of the content translation tool
We don't know which wikis have which of these implemented under which circumstances. We think that the following variables can affect which notifications a user receives:
Parameters for determining what popups someone sees
* Logged
** In
** Out
* Coincidental popups e.g. Homepage discovery popup appears on first pageview after account creation, which, for many users, is the open editor. See screenshot in task description: T229887
* Editing experience: is VE available (because of your browser, local wiki rules, etc.)?
* Default editing interface
** Wikitext
** VE
* Namespace
** Article
** Talk
** User
** etc.
* Wiki
* Single edit tab, or two edit tabs?
* Platform
** Mobile
** Desktop
* Is page protected/semi-protected? Which level of protection? Which reason?
Below are some visual examples of conflicts.
enwiki: conflict between GettingStarted and switching dialog
{F15249417}
viwiki: two pop-ups that appear immediately after creating an account from the editing context.
{F29968975}
viwiki: overlapping pop-ups appear immediately after the blue call to action in the central popup in the previous screen -- the bottom pop-up is another message from the visual editor.
{F29968980}
eswiki: overlapping pop-ups appearing because it's the first time a user tried to create a new article, and so they are being suggested to try Content Translation.
{F30230052}