Research at Stack Overflow is increasingly focused on addressing our community’s unique challenges and improving the experience of our users. With the community at the center of our efforts, we have the opportunity to address complex and exciting questions that support some of our most significant features.
As a reminder, our researchers often operate ahead of the product roadmap by several months or even multiple quarters, advising Product on the risks and opportunities in each area they explore. In light of our new knowledge-as-a-service model, this approach allows us to align our research efforts more closely with the evolving needs of our users.
This quarter’s projects
Motivations, incentives, and gamification
Last quarter, we kicked off this research to support our teams thinking about motivation and incentives for their current work and features, such as Staging Ground. These teams want to better understand motivations for their targeted users and encourage engagement in their features.
But let’s be honest with each other—we have a problem larger than teams wanting users to engage with their features. Our current gaming system is simply not accessible for all types of users. New users don’t know there is a game or how to play, people who do want to play are limited in what they can do because of gated activities, and users don’t get rewarded for those curation activities. We’ve heard consistently earning rep alone can lose its allure over time. We see an opportunity to make Stack Overflow’s gamification more engaging for both beginners and experts, ensuring that everyone finds value and excitement in participating.
As mentioned in our previous blog post, we are starting from our five hypothesized motivation groups:
- Learning: A user motivated by learning may ask questions or browse without engaging
- Community: Users motivated by community may chat, give feedback, participate on meta, moderate, or work to shape policies
- Helping Others: Those motivated by helping others may be casual answerers, vote, or collaborate by editing or commenting
- Prestige: Someone motivated by prestige may answer questions, strive to earn rep or badges, or be a subject matter expert in their field
- High Quality Content: A user motivated by high quality content strives to maintain our pristine library of knowledge. They may be seen editing, in review queues, voting to close, or other curation activities
So we have a sense of what might motivate users to be on the site, but we aren’t certain what current or future actions might appeal to them based on how/what they are motivated by or how many users may fall into each group. Our current phase of research is looking into confirming our motivation hypothesis, looking at what affordances may best tap into those motivators, and how our users want to be recognized and rewarded for their efforts and contributions. From there we hope to get a more accurate understanding of how many users fall into each motivation group through a survey and then start to ideate on what an inclusive and rewarding game could look like on Stack Overflow.
Content modalities and permanence
Looking towards the future, research wants to know what problems our users face when trying to connect and share knowledge. Is there a need for varying levels of permanence for our questions and answers and are our users interested in other types of content? We’ve heard from previous research that there doesn’t feel like there is a space for developers and technologists to commune—could Stack Overflow be that space? We will be starting to dig into this topic more late this quarter and will have more information for you in February 2025.
Jobs-to-be-Done being researched: “Find my people when I am looking to connect so that I can socialize with like-minded people in a positive environment.” “Identify gaps of knowledge when I find that knowledge that doesn’t exist so that I can complete the body of knowledge without it taking up a large amount of time”
How you can help
We are in dire need of highly-engaged research participants. We want to make Stack Overflow, but it’s hard to do that without our users participating in deep conversations around key areas of interest. Please sign up for research invitations in your account settings! We hope to speak with you soon.