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 method permits us to align our analysis efforts extra intently with the evolving wants of our customers.
Final quarter, we kicked off this analysis to help our groups occupied with motivation and incentives for his or her present work and options, akin to Staging Floor. These groups need to higher perceive motivations for his or her focused customers and encourage engagement of their options.
However let’s be trustworthy with one another—now we have an issue bigger than groups wanting customers to interact with their options. Our present gaming system is solely not accessible for all sorts of customers. New customers don’t know there’s a sport or the right way to play, individuals who do need to play are restricted in what they will do due to gated actions, and customers don’t get rewarded for these curation actions. We’ve heard constantly incomes rep alone can lose its attract over time. We see a possibility to make Stack Overflow’s gamification extra participating for each learners and consultants, guaranteeing that everybody finds worth and pleasure in collaborating.
As talked about in our earlier weblog publish, we’re ranging from our 5 hypothesized motivation teams:
- Studying: A person motivated by studying might ask questions or browse with out participating
- Group: Customers motivated by group might chat, give suggestions, take part on meta, reasonable, or work to form insurance policies
- Serving to Others: These motivated by serving to others could also be informal answerers, vote, or collaborate by enhancing or commenting
- Status: Somebody motivated by status might reply questions, try to earn rep or badges, or be a subject skilled of their discipline
- Excessive High quality Content material: A person motivated by top quality content material strives to take care of our pristine library of data. They might be seen enhancing, in evaluate queues, voting to shut, or different curation actions
So now we have a way of what may encourage customers to be on the location, however we aren’t sure what present or future actions may enchantment to them based mostly on how/what they’re motivated by or what number of customers might fall into every group. Our present section of analysis is trying into confirming our motivation speculation, what affordances might greatest faucet into these motivators, and the way our customers need to be acknowledged and rewarded for his or her efforts and contributions. From there we hope to get a extra correct understanding of what number of customers fall into every motivation group by way of a survey after which begin to ideate on what an inclusive and rewarding sport may appear to be on Stack Overflow.
Wanting in the direction of the longer term, analysis needs to know what issues our customers face when making an attempt to attach and share data. Is there a necessity for various ranges of permanence for our questions and solutions and are our customers thinking about different forms of content material? We’ve heard from earlier analysis that there doesn’t really feel like there’s a house for builders and technologists to commune—may Stack Overflow be that house? We might be beginning to dig into this subject extra late this quarter and may have extra info for you in February 2025.
Jobs-to-be-Finished being researched: “Discover my individuals when I’m seeking to join in order that I can socialize with like-minded individuals in a constructive surroundings.” “Determine gaps of data after I discover that data that doesn’t exist in order that I can full the physique of data with out it taking on a considerable amount of time”
We’re in dire want of highly-engaged analysis members. We need to make Stack Overflow, however it’s onerous to try this with out our customers collaborating in deep conversations round key areas of curiosity. Please sign up for analysis invites in your account settings! We hope to talk with you quickly.
