Talk:Account creation user experience/Benefits of signing up

Other draft ideas (FY2012-13)

When they're ready two clear benefits to add to the drafts (and test):

• Notifications
• Messaging (may just replace copy with respect to user communications)

Scaffolding, setting expectations

Let's be deliberate about how we scaffold these benefits. Some of the benefits (e.g., moving pages) are not likely to be an initial motivator for readers/new editors to register for an account. The focus on a limited number of benefits is a good way to make sure we communicate the most important and compelling ones given where a user is in their lifecycle.

The general use cases we tend to come across for account creation are (from Lennart's survey) in no particular order:

1. Users think they need an account to edit
2. Users who have edited anonymously for a bit and now want an account
3. Users who want to accomplish a specific task (e.g., create article on enwp, upload image)
4. Readers who want an account for whatever reason (e.g., curious, wanted to be part of WP, thought there would be more features)

Each of these cases is going to respond to different benefits. The tricky part is that without a proto-account, we don't know a priori which bucket the user falls into at the moment they create an account.

Also, I would be careful about overselling the reader benefits. True, accounts offer the technical ability to track one's interests through the watchlist, but the UI isn't built for that purpose. The average reader will probably end up getting frustrated if we offer this as a benefit. Howief (talk) 18:19, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Agreed about the reader benefits. As for the different benefits, I think we can play to many of them without overloading the list or getting too technical. For the first one, some of our drafts in the past included something like text below the "Benefits of signing up" header ala Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but registering an account lets you... Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:11, 31 July 2012 (UTC)