There are any number of ways to classify and think about the ideas we're evaluating—and, more importantly, to organize the recommendations that will come out of the New Editors process. But I'd like to argue for a way that really hit me as we worked through the user journeys exercise in our last session.
As I read the various user stories, similar themes emerged and coalesced in my mind. In particular, people had often faced similar challenges—and been helped in similar ways. With this in mind, the approach that will be most useful for our purposes, it now seems to me, is not just to evaluate which ideas are the strongest, or to parcel out different solutions that address different user personas, or to think about which assignments might fall into the wheelhouses of which WMF teams... Instead, I think we need to identify the key junctures in the New Editor journey, and then devise solutions aimed at addressing the users' needs at each phase.
Here are some examples of what I mean, just as straw men to illustrate what this might look like:
Juncture #1: Registration
- Ideas around onboarding, gathering profile information, welcoming, encouraging with recognition...
Juncture #2: exploring and finding a niche
- Ideas around progressive task suggestion, building awareness of the community, steering to Wikiprojects...
Juncture #3: first conflict/rejection
- Ideas around peer-to-peer assistance, improved policy pages...
The danger of not thinking in this way is that we run the risk of creating interventions that move users down the retention road a mile, only to drop them straight into the next (predictable) pitfall.
I'd always known that we wouldn't fix the problem of editor retention with just one intervention. But thinking about the new editor journey provides, I think, a useful framework for picking the most promising interventions and imagining how various efforts might fit together into a larger program of mutually-reinforcing parts. It's a way to turn a market-basket of ideas into a story about about what our users need and how we plan to help them. And, finally, asking which ideas help users most at particular points gives us more concrete criteria for evaluating and comparing very disparate ideas.