Launchpad gives you no clues what to do after creating a new account

If someone creates a Launchpad account for the purpose of using ShipIt, their "branding", "home page", timezone, etc in Launchpad won't be relevant. Same goes for if someone creates a Launchpad account so they can buy something from the Canonical Store: making people think they had to faff around in Launchpad would cause some of them to give up, reducing Canonical's revenue.

So, probably we should do this just for (a) people who sign up unprompted, and (b) people who return to Launchpad after having signed up.

SSO will be setup as a standalone service. Other applications like ShipIt will create accounts without creating Launchpad profiles. So the only issue we need to address is how to communicate what the user can do with his profile without interrupting his task.

The feature I want most is a notifications page to see all changes I care about in launchpad. I image this as a light message center that can be used in place of email. The logged-in-as link on every page could indicate I have new messages. When I am on vacation, some email messages are routed to the notifcation page.

The simplest approach is to send the user a welcome email that includes information about what he can do with his profile.

The "New to Launchpad" guide is linked prominently from the Launchpad registration email. I've updated the guide and it is here:

https://help.launchpad.net/NewToLaunchpad

I think that gives enough detail of what a new registrant would want to do.