Back in February, we shared our Q1 Community Roadmap with you. In that post, we described our four roadmap themes which will continue throughout the year. In our commitment to provide transparency, we will continue to share our roadmaps each quarter. So without further ado, here is our Q2 Community Roadmap:
Q2 2020 April May June Understand community Publish feedback matrix Site Satisfaction Survey Q2 Community @thon Engage with community Convene pro-tem moderator council
CC license round 2 Update moderator reinstatement
Training launch Suicide prevention
Moderator Town Halls Improve community feedback metrics Collect new user feedback Increase User Engagement Dark Mode (beta) & Ultra Dark Mode Email drip campaign Review queue phase 2 updates
Understand community
This month, we built out our Community Feedback Matrix to help us evaluate all the types of users and types of feedback that we collect. We will be sharing this in our April The Loop post. In May, our quarterly Site Satisfaction Survey will go out to some of our users. In June, we are planning a Community@athon event within our company to encourage employees to interact with our network and communities more. Our goal is to ensure that we have balanced, consistent feedback from across the different segments of our community and that we continue to improve community interactions and understanding throughout the company.
Engage with community
While we had hoped to have our new version of the Moderator Agreement ready to go in March, between the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis and our desire to get it right, this release has been delayed. We have had multiple rounds of feedback from internal stakeholders and a group of moderators, and we will be sharing it with the larger moderator community this month.
Currently, we are soliciting nominations for the Pro-Tem Moderator Council and will shortly move into the selection process. The members and their initial responsibilities will be announced by the end of April.
We will plan to update the Moderator Reinstatement policy in May to include the Moderator Council’s proposed involvement in the process. Our Community Managers have been hard at work creating content for Moderator training which we have shared for feedback on the Mods Teams instance. The plan is to incorporate the feedback and then select and implement a platform for delivery of the training, which should launch in May.
In June, we plan to start a series of moderator town halls to create additional opportunities for our moderators to meet with CMs and other staff in a casual way to talk about specific issues or get to know each other better.
Sometimes our moderators will come across content by a user where something is shared that indicates that the user may be considering taking their own life. As you can imagine, these are some of the hardest moments for anyone to encounter. Our moderator team desires to show compassion and care, and this quarter, we’re going to set aside some time to work with organizations that specialize in these interactions. Our goal is to provide a mix of tools, support, and education to ensure that the moderators have the proper guidance and options to hand these situations off to lessen the burden on their shoulders.
Improve community feedback metrics
Through the development of the Community Feedback Matrix, we realized that we are not sufficiently collecting feedback from new users to our sites. In May, we plan to implement a process to solicit feedback from new users to better understand their pain points and needs. This feedback will be incorporated along with the rest of our qualitative and quantitative feedback to build our roadmap, features, and programs for the future.
Increase user engagement
Due to the global Covid-19 crisis, we chose not to launch our normal April Fool’s Day prank on our users. We did launch our Beta version of Dark Mode and made what would have been our prank, Ultra Dark Mode, that was available for users for a limited time. Dark mode has been our most asked for feature for years, and we were so excited to share it with you all.
We had to push the launch of a series of educational email campaigns for new users, non-active users, question askers, and question answerers due to a technical integration bug on the vendor side for which we are still waiting for resolution. These series will be designed to take a proactive approach in providing guidance and support for all users at various stages.
In June, we plan to begin work on a series of backend and UX updates to review queues to improve the user experience for our curators in addition to backend improvements that will help us make updates more easily in the future. You will also see test improvements to the question close experience and iterations on the recently shipped Question & Answer Follow feature.
We are sharing our roadmap to create transparency with our users. As with any product development, unanticipated complications may cause our dates to slip on occasion, but we are committed to delivering these initiatives and features to you as soon as we can.
We are happy to hear your thoughts and feedback on MSE.