Topic on Talk:Talk pages consultation 2019/New user tests

I am just speculating, but I think the default Vector skin may be contributing to difficulty finding Talk and other items at the top of the page. Vector styling literally makes the editor-linkset fade into the background.

I would suggest you see if Monobook makes it easier to find Talk, Edit, and the other links for editors. I'm not sure if there's any recent data, but Monobook seems to get a lot of usage by editors. It would be painful to discover that the switch to Vector had diminished our inflow of people finding the Edit and Talk options.

Another thing, the user tests seem to involve only a single article edit. In real world use new editors typically make multiple edits before any Talk page activity. I expect more editing tend to help them finding the Talk page, and make them more familiar and comfortable when they do arrive at a Talk page to use it. The more edits they've made the more likely they are to recognize that Talk isn't really anything new, that it's just another page to edit. Alsee (talk) 07:04, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

I agree with this; it would be useful to test even with only Monobook, Timeless and Minerva (without making any other changes), since Vector is demonstrably a big factor in how easy or difficult it is to edit. (I think it's also possible that those users who try to edit a talk page first are actually less likely to be retained because of that experience, which would explain the abundance or overabundance of new users who edit articles first.) On the other hand, it could be difficult to get accurate results using the non-default skins because of how much time many Internet users have spent staring at Vector.

@Trizek (WMF), Whatamidoing (WMF): Notifying in case no one from the team has found the new comments.

We are monitoring all the comments, no worries. It is just time consuming to acknowledge that we have seen every posts. :)