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I'm with Sylvaine in saying that longer fics tend to work better as a first-ever introduction to a canon. Short fics rely on too much that's unsaid but understood-to-be-known, in order to get right to the meaty stuff, whereas longfic at least needs to take the time to set up whatever it is the fic is going to focus on for all that length! So you might miss a bunch of nuance but you're more likely to at least get something worthwhile out of the experience.

I'd actually argue with you, Melannen, and say that complete-au's are the easiest to start with to get your footing in a new fandom, at least if the intention is that you're going to keep reading more fics in that fandom. Sometimes it's too much information to keep track of at once when you're trying to figure out what the worldbuilding of the canon is alongside figuring out the characters and the relationships. But with an au, you know that the fic author is making up all the worldbuilding and has to give the reader some kind of accessible introduction to it (or just assume you already know what a coffee shop fic is, because you probably do). So you can expend all your detective energy on figuring out what kind of people the various characters are and how they relate to each other. Once I've got a handle on that, I find it's easier to move into fic that's closer tied to canon, because I understand the characters at least a bit, so I have more mental space to figure out the worldbuilding and the relevant canon plot points that are being talked around.

Of course, all of this depends on how complicated the canon is. If it's something really straightforward, or something that is itself based on known tropes (eg with a buddy cop tv show, you already know some of what canon is probably about without knowning a thing about this particular canon), then it's easier to just dive straight in to canon-based fic.

Another recommendation I have is that, whatever you do, don't start with a bodyswap fic as your first ever fic in a new fandom. You will get so confused about which character traits belong with which character vs which character's body. Ask me how I know! (It's obvious how I know. I've done it. Successfully even, but that was really playing on hardmode.)