Hey @HFan-WMF (and @Sneha), I'm catching up from last week and am curious why we're going to implement something different than the existing watchstar behavior, where the page is saved to the watchlist upon login/account creation. I'm concerned that users will come back to the page and be confused as to whether the page is saved or not. The existing onboarding dialog isn't quite right for this, so I get why we're not showing that. Would it be clearer to users to save the page and show them the popover pointing to their saved pages when they return to the article?

@AnneT A few reasons why this differs
1 the user may have clicked the save out of curiosity because of pulsating dot (I discussed behaviour with Hsaunwei and we are going to persist for the experiment until they tap) and so their intention might not have been to save the article but simply tap it out of curiosity. In those cases it would add something to "reading list" and count as people adding things to reading list. Whereas at this point we want to see if this feature is interesting enough for people to create account.
2 I have added some more details in figma regarding the flow. If we add the item automatically after login we would have to show where to find the saved items dialog as soon as you log in. Currently it appears when you first tap on save. It might be okay to show it after login but there are other dialog mentioned in #4
3 We also show the dialog for where watchstar moved after log in for some cases, and we would need to sequence that and "where to find saved items" dialog one after the other which can seem like too many dialogs.
4 Also the star behaviour is not going to stay as the plan is to replace it with save eventually so there won't be inconsistency going forward
5 The current watch star behaviour of auto saving after login is a bit confusing as there is no indication that something is saved besides the change in icon and it also skips the pop up asking users how to long to watch etc. We would end up in similar situation in the future if we have things like which list you want to save etc. It would be better and more contextual if it appeared right after you tapped on save.

@Sneha thanks so much for the thorough explanation! I understand now why we're going with the UX as described in the task.

Re-estimating at a 3 as the scope has changed to to removing any editor onboarding experiences and testing the workflow

@HFan-WMF / @Sneha, can you confirm whether we want users in the treatment group to skip the welcome survey? I think y'all are familiar with this, but just in case, here are some screenshots:

You're taken to the survey page after creating an account:

Once you complete it, you're taken to another screen where you have to click a button to return to the article page (my local article is called RL2_2, sorry, not a clear example 😂). If you instead click "skip survey", you're taken directly back to the article.

Thanks for checking, @AnneT I am in favor of skipping the onboarding survey, as they've indicated to us already by coming in through the bookmark feature that they are more interested as a reader to start. There is also some discussion with the Editor Growth team about eventually retiring the survey altogether in the future and depending more on contextual usage signals to try and figure out what features to highlight for a user.

If it's possible let's also skip the "Get started here!" tour that points at the user menu.

Noting @Sneha said we should also skip our own onboarding popup, but I might be confusing other people/myself

@SToyofuku-WMF I think that was the original plan, but the simplified plan that @HFan-WMF presented in mid-sprint check-in yesterday is to allow the ReadingLIsts onboarding popup to display rather than skipping it, to cut down on the different user paths we have to maintain

@Urbanecm_WMF @Sgs FYI reader experience might need your teams help with this one!

Yea as already said for this usecase we want to skip 1) welcome survey 2) get started dialog 3) our onbaording dialog. I see this last one is complicated to do so its okay to leave for experiment. I want to note that we do want to remove this onboarding dialog post beta. But still keep the dialog pointing to where to find saved items.

Hey @Urbanecm_WMF and @Sgs, I wanted to ask about how we can skip the Welcome Survey for users who created an account via the ReadingLists account creation CTA (an experimental UI that's triggered by clicking the bookmark button on mobile for anonymous users).

I thought it would make sense to create a "campaign" for this experiment, since you have existing infrastructure for campaign configuration that includes skipping the survey. However, I'm now unsure this is the right approach. I thought I could configure a campaign then put the configured URL query parameter in the link to the Special:CreateAccount page, but this doesn't work because all but a few specific query parameters are stripped from the URL when that page loads. I'm now wondering if the campaigns are specific to the CreateAccount page itself, and thus not meant to be used in the way I want to.

I'd greatly appreciate advice on how we might achieve this. Thanks in advance!

Update: @Jdlrobson-WMF pointed out that I needed the Campaigns extention to get the campaign URL param working locally, so I've got this working now. Thanks, Jon!

Recap: for this experiment, we want users to click on the bookmark button, go to Special:CreateAccount and create an account, skip the welcome survey, and return to the article page they were on when they clicked the bookmark button. To skip the welcome survey, I created a campaign with the skipWelcomeSurvey property set to true.

Unfortunately, when there is a campaign that skips the welcome survey, the GrowthExperiements extension sends the user to the Homepage. Here's the relevant code:

// In WelcomeSurveyHooks:onCentralAuthPostLoginRedirect

$campaign = $this->campaignLoader->getCampaign();
if ( $this->campaignConfig->isGrowthCampaign( $campaign )
    && $this->campaignConfig->shouldSkipWelcomeSurvey( $campaign )
) {
    $returnTo = $this->specialPageFactory->getTitleForAlias( 'Homepage' )->getPrefixedText();
    $returnToQuery = $this->addAccountJustCreatedToQuery( $returnToQuery );
    return false;
}

We need to determine a way to both skip the welcome survey and return to the article page.

Edit: I've posted a patch to GrowthExperiments to modify this behavior.

Change #1285889 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anne Tomasevich; author: Anne Tomasevich):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1285889

Change #1285912 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anne Tomasevich; author: Anne Tomasevich):

[mediawiki/extensions/ReadingLists@master] [Account Creation CTA] Disable GrowthExperiments features

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1285912

Change #1285913 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anne Tomasevich; author: Anne Tomasevich):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Add ReadingLists Account Creation CTA campaign

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1285913

To test this work, you'll need the GrowthExperiments extension set up locally (no need to fully set up extensions like CirrusSearch, you just need to download and enable all the required extensions). Ideally, you would also have CentralAuth set up locally to test this more robustly. Then:

• Pull the ReadingLists patch
• Pull the GrowthExtensions patch
• Set the following in LocalSettings.php. In reality, this will be added via config (see patch)

$wgGECampaigns = [
    'account-creation-reading-list-cta' => [
        'pattern' => '/^account-creation-reading-list-cta$/',
        'skipWelcomeSurvey' => true
    ]
];

Change #1285912 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/ReadingLists@master] [Account Creation CTA] Disable GrowthExperiments features

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1285912

Change #1285889 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1285889

Change #1286327 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anne Tomasevich; author: Anne Tomasevich):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@wmf/1.47.0-wmf.2] WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1286327

Change #1285913 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Add ReadingLists Account Creation CTA campaign

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1285913

Change #1286327 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@wmf/1.47.0-wmf.2] WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1286327

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-05-14T13:29:26Z] <krinkle@deploy1003> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1285913|Add ReadingLists Account Creation CTA campaign (T422169)]], [[gerrit:1286327|WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey (T422169)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-05-14T13:31:13Z] <krinkle@deploy1003> krinkle, annet: Backport for [[gerrit:1285913|Add ReadingLists Account Creation CTA campaign (T422169)]], [[gerrit:1286327|WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey (T422169)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can now be verified there.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-05-14T13:42:00Z] <krinkle@deploy1003> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1285913|Add ReadingLists Account Creation CTA campaign (T422169)]], [[gerrit:1286327|WelcomeSurvey: Respect returnTo for campaigns skipping the survey (T422169)]] (duration: 12m 33s)