As the world continues to change, Stack Overflow is working hard to remain a valuable resource for developers. Our mission to do that is clear: to cultivate community, power learning, and unlock growth for every developer, everywhere. This next era of the platform comes at the perfect time. The time when we can change not only how we serve developers, but also how we present ourselves as a brand. This quarter, we are preparing for a redesign. One that creates a better user experience through an accessible, modern UI and features that promote collaboration, skill development, and accelerated problem-solving.
Last quarter’s projects
New content types → Sub communities
Last quarter, we identified opportunities for new content types, and this quarter, we zoomed in on the bold and underserved opportunities to learn at an even deeper level.
Part of identifying the best way forward for Stack Overflow is to evaluate what our strengths and weaknesses are in today’s world. Unsurprisingly, we know AI can answer simple questions quickly. However, AI has its limits, and expert insight is still needed for nuanced edge cases, emerging technologies, or subjective questions that seek guidance in unfamiliar or complex areas.
However, strict moderation is pushing people away. The high barrier to posting and the risk of questions being closed make Stack Overflow feel unwelcoming. Generic forums don’t fill the gap either—they are perceived as too broad, and members lack the expertise that Stack Overflow is known for. Faced with these failures, developers turn to people they know personally because they trust their contact has relevant skills and will respond promptly. Stack Overflow’s opportunity lies in digitally replicating these trusted expert connections.
Today, Stack Overflow is a massive forum of information where finding the right expert and getting your post in front of the right person is like finding a needle in a haystack. What if we created focused communities around specific areas of expertise? The users we spoke with emphasized that building connections within the community is essential to establishing trust. Strict moderation has created a reputation for quality, but has instilled fear amongst developers—afraid of getting rejected, especially for messy, exploratory questions where human expertise matters most. We see an opportunity to create dedicated spaces for developers to explore other needs—like debating subjective choices or thinking out loud—distinct from the core Q&A. Next, we'll examine similar initiatives to understand their approaches and what contributed to their success or failure.
Challenges
When it comes to Challenges, we received in-product feedback from over 1,700 users, 74 survey responses, and spoke with four users in 1:1 interviews. The most surprising thing we learned was that 94% of users who gave in-product feedback said they were interested in Challenges on Stack Overflow. This is by far one of the highest signals we have received at Stack Overflow to continue our investment. Now, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement—just that Stack Overflow has the audience for a feature like Challenges. Learning a new skill was the top motivator for completing a Challenge with "just for fun" as a close second. Users were mostly interested in coding puzzles, but there was also an appetite for text manipulation and math-related challenges. The biggest missing pieces for challenges were the ability for users to track their growth, share their progress on their Stack Overflow profile, portfolio, or resume, and interact with other participants' submissions to enhance their learning. With these things in mind, finding the right challenge for the right user is the biggest challenge that Challenges will face in the future.
Stackoverflow.ai
We know that developers and non-developers across the world are using AI to build things, so we wanted to understand how our AI product could offer distinct value compared to other AI tools in users' workflows. Our team conducted a survey and multiple 1:1 user interviews.
Developers today use AI for a diverse set of tasks, including debugging code, writing unit tests, web-scraping, and learning new concepts. But AI has mixed results. AI has changed the way many users work—with a back-and-forth process that often leads to significant adjustments to the final output. A key desire for developers is for their AI solutions to be implemented directly in their IDEs, reducing context switching.
We presented multiple concepts to users. It was a tight race between the options, but in the end, a majority of the people we spoke with were interested in the Related Content concept, which is what we shipped for our first iteration of Ask Stack. There were concerns about the relevance and accuracy of the content and where it should be featured in the product. We are continuing to work towards the best solution that helps users find answers quickly on Stack Overflow.
This quarter’s projects
If you haven’t heard, we have been investing in a rebranding. Rebrands typically focus on shaping how consumers perceive the brand. It is finally time for us to take that brand and envision how it may look within the product. There are a few important areas that we plan to focus our research efforts on over the next quarter, with this redesign in mind:
- Exploring the information architecture of our products in response to the announcement that we will sunset the Stack Exchange brand. This is likely to take us around 18 months to complete.
- Understanding the usability of key product components, such as the way a question is displayed within a list. This has been a hot topic in the past. We’ve already performed a Meta analysis on the topic, but will continue with traditional research.
- Further investigating the concept of separate spaces for developers, and whether it is the right solution to give users a place for community building.
We plan to take concepts of what the product redesign could look like for feedback sometime in September. We will have separate posts to share key areas, such as color changes. Stay tuned for more information. For now, we are excited to learn even more about our users and their growing needs.
How you can help
We need highly-engaged research participants, especially new users and users who don’t engage often. If you are this type of user or know someone who fits this description, please sign up for research invitations in your account settings! We hope to speak with you soon.