Hello. I had recently made a Survey among Hebrew Wikipedia's users regarding the Newcomers' Features, which was active for about a month (October 14th-November 7th). I would like to share here important results, notes and suggestions from this survey, which will hopefully help in the future development of the features for all of the relevant Wikipedias in general, and the Hebrew Wikipedia in particular. 22 people responded, most of them (except for 5-6) were experienced users, so this should also be considered when seeing the results.
(most of the questions were in a scale from 1-5. 1= not at all, 5=very much)
*When being asked about how much the users are satisfied from the features, most of the users chose 4 and 5 (out of 22, 6 users chose 5 and 7 users chose 4). Therefore, the users are overall satisfied with the features.
*When being asked how much they would like the features to stay in the Hebrew Wikipedia for the future, most of the users chose 5- 11 users out of 22 (so they indeed want the features to stay).
*When being asked how much they would like the features to be available as default for both new and experienced users, most of the users chose 4 and 5 (7 users chose 4, 5 users chose 5 while 4 users chose 3, 2 users chose 2, and 4 users chose 1). Therefore, there is a will among the users to see the features for both new and experienced users as default in the future (however, I also explained later that it's just an option that may be available for the future, and not something to be done soon).
*When asking users who were/are mentors regarding their satisfaction from the mentorship, most of the users chose 3 (5 out of 14), while 4 users chose 4 and 4 users chose 1 (and another user chose 2), so there isn't enough satisfaction from the mentorship.
I got a few more encouraging results about liking the newcomers' homepage (out of 8 users, 7 users chose answers 4 and 5), users being satisfied with the module of suggested edits (out of 5 users, 4 chose answers 4 and 5), or users being satisfied with the help panel (out of 4 users, 4 chose answers 4 and 5), but sadly only few users answered there, so I don't think it can represent enough users to use as a collective answer from our community.
In addition, I would also like to mention a few notes and suggestions that were raised in said survey:
*Users didn't like the random matching of mentees (I explained the reason for such thing, however, and that helping users with basic questions is not as same as a mandatory mentorship and thus personal matching of mentors is not critical for this kind of mentorship. I also offered to tag specific people if they are needed, and to use templates we have to tag experts in various subjects).
*Mentors are unable to know who their mentees are and their contributions (was mentioned quite a lot, before the survey and in it. I mentioned that such thing is in the Phabricator and in development, but this emphasises the need and the importance of such tools).
*It was reported that new users don't answer after they questions were answered (and it even seemed many didn't continue in Wikipedia after that). I wrote about the importance of tagging users, but it's not necessarily the factor here and probably also happened with tagged users.
*Users asked for more subjects in the suggested edits module (and to separate subjects: to separate "Philosophy and Religion" to two separate subjects, and separate the different religions into different subjects instead of putting them all into one). My personal recommendation in this case would be using our portals (hubs, "main pages" for specific subjects) for listing subjects in this module.
*Users suggested to use flow pages (or even mail) for the discussions with the mentees that should be in experienced users' talk pages in order not to overload talk pages, helping the mentees to find the page to talk with their mentors, and to help them not to struggle with WikiCode.
Thanks and sorry for the long message. Hope this will be helpful, and will improve the experience of the features.