Our Community Products teams continue to be focused on the pain points and tasks developers want to accomplish every day when they visit Stack Overflow. We are passionate about helping developers learn, share, and grow in their careers, and it has been exciting to watch some experimentation and discovery efforts come to life over the last quarter. Highlights from this last quarter include:
- Improving the experience for new askers:
- Question Assistant: Using models trained against community reviewed Stack Overflow questions, coupled with suggestions powered by Google Gemini, the Question Assistant helps new askers improve their question and boost the likelihood of getting an answer by 12%.
- Staging Ground: A longer term effort to create a space for new askers to get help from knowledgeable community members within a dedicated environment. After a slew of enhancements, we’re happy to see this feature set doubles question success rates on the platform from 35% to 71%.
- Bringing Jobs to more developers: The international expansion of Stack Overflow Jobs in Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands allows more employers to reach tech talent through Stack Overflow. We hope to see this expansion continue to support more developers in their careers around the world.
- An updated homepage and set up experience for new users serving as a landing place to discover content based on their interests. This has helped kickstart the onboarding process for those users to familiarize themselves with the site, encourage taking an action to earn reputation or badges, and customize their content through watching tags.
As we look forward to the new year, we are eager to expand Stack Overflow to meet the diverse needs of developers around the world. In many ways, we feel we’re just scratching the surface, and there’s so much opportunity to do more. While there have been some distinct experimental features added to the platform, such as Collectives and Discussions, Q&A continues to be the primary experience. It’s no secret – we care deeply about Q&A! It’s been a cornerstone in helping the world of developers build the world around us! But Q&A is only one mode for learning and creating, and cataloguing knowledge. Stack Overflow must be accessible to all and support different learning needs, modes, and preferences. This year, our product teams will be leaning into faster learning, experimentation, testing out new experiences, and exploring ways in which we can support every developer.
For the remainder of this quarter, we continue our work on improving core Q&A flows to help make asking, answering, and contributing to knowledge easier for everyone. Some things you can expect to see over the next couple of months:
- Iteration and expansion of Question Assistant
- Improving Ask and Answer flows
- Allowing more users to contribute through actions such as commenting and voting
- Better user to content matching
- Further testing to help activate new users
- And lastly, an extended Community Asks Sprint to make up for a deferred round that landed near the holidays
And we’ve got a lot more queued up than those things - but for more on that, you’ll have to stay tuned!
As always, we’re excited to share findings as we go and value your input along the way. If you’d like to provide your input, we invite you to opt into our user research list.