We have made a recent update on drupal.org that you haven’t probably noticed. In fact, although it's a meaningful and important section, I bet you have not seen it in months or even years. It's something you would have only seen when you registered on Drupal.org for the first time. I’m talking about the welcome email for new registered users.
One of the goals we have had recently is improving the way our users register and interact with drupal.org for the first time. Improvements to onboarding should improve what I call the long tail of the (Open Source) contribution pipeline (a concept, the long tail of contribution, that I will explain further in the next few days).
For now, let’s have a look at one of the first things new users in our community saw first:
This is what I called the huge wall of text. Do you remember seeing it for the first time? Did you read any of it at all? Do you remember anything important in that email? Or did you just mark it read and move on?
Fortunately, we've taken a first, incremental step to make improvements. As I said before, this isn't something our existing userbase will see, but the new welcome email to Drupal.org has changed and been simplified quite a bit. Here is the new welcome email:
We have replaced a lot of the wall of text with a simpler set of sections and links, and landing pages on drupal.org. This simplifies the welcome email, but is also going to allow us to track which links are most useful to new users, how many pages they visit on drupal.org, where do they get stuck, what interests them most, etc - and use that to make further refinements over time.
The other section I wanted to include is something that is very important for the Drupal Association, but also for the whole community. I wanted to highlight the contribution area, something that was not even mentioned in the old email. Our hope is this is an opportunity to foster and promote contribution from new users.
A few weeks ago I also launched a poll around contribution. This poll combined with the updates on these few changes in the user registration are aimed towards the same goal: improving contribution onboarding. You can still participate if you’d like to, just visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XRTNNM3
Now, if you are curious about what I am calling the long tail of the contribution pipeline, watch this space.
File attachments: confirmed-user.png