Last month, we shared our upcoming priorities from a product roadmap point of view. This included initiatives like scaling Staging Ground, improving answering, and user activation. Today, I want to share the research the User Experience team, which I lead, will be focused on over the next quarter and how you can help. At Stack Overflow, our researchers are focused on strategic initiatives and big, complex questions. They typically run ahead of the product roadmap by several months or even multiple quarters. Please keep that in mind as you navigate what we want to learn this quarter.
This quarter’s projects
Motivations, incentives, and gamification
As mentioned in our last blog post, one of our researchers hypothesized five motivation groups through a cluster analysis of site behavior data, a survey, a Meta Stack Exchange post, workshops, and more. Over the next quarter or two, we hope to validate these hypotheses and use that knowledge to recommend changes to our gamification system that will better serve the variety of motivations within the community and help individuals feel they belong and are valued.
We have various teams currently thinking about how they can motivate and incentivize users to engage with their current features, such as Staging Ground, and we hope this research can support them. More importantly, we hope this research can pave the way for a bright future where learning, editing, and reviewing are better recognized and better rewarded as key elements of the community.
Continuing to improve the answering experience
We spent last quarter focused on understanding the experience and pain points surrounding answers on Stack Overflow. We learned that one of the biggest challenges for answer seekers is finding or receiving answers, especially for complex or niche topics. We also learned that answer authors often use various tools outside of Stack Overflow to craft their answers, creating a fragmented experience that doesn't fully meet their unique needs. We’ve also identified the need for better tooling and improvements in educating new authors on how to create high-quality answers to reduce the burden on answer reviewers who face recurring quality issues. We hope to provide the community with more detailed findings on this in the future as we continue to hone in on solutions and research the effectiveness of possible solutions.
Jobs-to-be-Done being researched: “Organize knowledge when others want to learn a new topic so that I can help others solve their problem and advance their knowledge without spending a lot of time on finding the right materials.”
Other research this quarter
While the above two pieces are our strategic research focus for this quarter, we will also perform tactical research. Tactical research aims to inform smaller decisions. This research is typically performed by one of our designers while supported by a researcher. Some of the research you may see:
- Feedback on a Stack Overflow homepage/feed update
- Continued new asker and question quality research
How you can help
As a reminder, the best way to get involved is to sign up for research invitations in your account settings. We need community members like you to participate in our research and engage in deep conversations around key areas of interest. As always, we look forward to working and learning together.