The "homepage treatment" really consists of two parts: (1) having access to the homepage from your user space (2) any features that drive newcomers to their homepage or otherwise help them find it.
In the initial version of the homepage, the only feature that will drive newcomers to their homepage is the fact that clicking on their username in their personal tools takes them there. Based on T217624, we learned that we can expect between 15% and 30% of newcomers to encounter their homepage in that way (depending on the wiki). And so in this task, we want to design additional features that help newcomers discover their homepage.
The team has had many ideas on how to do this, some of which are already subtasks. There are likely many more ideas.
Already subtasked:
- Driving traffic immediately after account creation (T222852 and T224883)
- Includes work on welcome survey confirmation
- Includes guided tour
- Includes redirect after account creation
- Link or redirect from when a user clicks to confirm their email address (T222848)
- Addition to Main Page (T222847)
- Link from empty contributions page (T225328 and T227575)
Not yet subtasked:
- CentralNotice: this is a system for displaying banners to targeted users. We could theoretically send banners to newcomers telling them about their homepage.
- Adding some kind of affordance in personal tools to encourage users to click their username: many wikis have an automated welcome message that posts on a newcomer's User Talk page. Getting this message shows them a notification in their personal tools, which we know 18% of Korean users immediately click on. This is evidence that some kind of attraction to personal tools could yield interactions.
- Posting on User Talk: automatically posting a message on a user's talk page is an existing way to trigger an affordance in personal tools.
- Link in help panel: 10% - 20% of newcomers open up the help panel, which may be a way to tell them about the homepage, which is another newcomer tool they might be interested in.
- Notification: send a notification that welcomes the new users, and encourages to click to go to their homepage. Be mindful of conflicts with wikis' existing welcome notifications. Alternatively, we could give instructions to communities on how to incorporate the homepage into the wiki's existing welcome notifications or templates.