Tech Expertise in Forum Groups
Goal: Build trust among users looking for answers to their technical questions in the Spiceworks forums.
Team: The team comprised of the Director of Product Management, Director of Community Management (CM) and a team of engineers focused on audience products.
My role: Research and Lead Designer
Tools: Invision, Sketch
Key Metrics: Increased engagement with Community topics (members); Bounce-rate (guests)
Challenges
Trust is always an issue when seeking advice in online forums, and when you’re looking for tech advice it can get even trickier to discern “good” advice from “bad”. We have a few systems in place to help readers find the best responses. The original poster (OP) has the ability to mark a “Best Answer” from the replies to their post, readers can give “Helpful Votes” to replies that they found helpful. All of these contributions are visible per post as well as on the user’s profile so you can see where their expertise is.
For newer users or visitors from search engines, assessing the trust-worthiness of those replies can be difficult. They haven’t built their trust over time and experience with these people, so they rely on other cues to help them decide.
Brainstorming Solutions
The team got together to brainstorm on possible solutions that would appeal to both our members and guests. Having the perspectives of different members of the team gave us a diverse pool of ideas, and we narrowed it to the ones that we liked the most and voted on which ones to further develop. We landed on 6 possible experiments to run (shown below) and I worked on fleshing out the details and UI a bit more. Once we had more detail, I worked with the engineers to better understand the level of effort for each and working with the PM we decided to move forward with displaying a user’s relevant forum contribution stats on their replies.
6 proposed ideas outlined and any relevant UI shown.
The Expertise system
Having a CM on the team gave us tremendous insight into what levels of contributions constituted an “expert” for those who are active in our forums. His knowledge of who the “power users” were and who the subject-matter-experts (SMEs) were came in handy when testing how our system was performing. We worked out each contribution’s “weight” based on how helpful each contribution-type was and whether their contribution’s weight should degrade over time (it should, tech moves fast!). Having some degradation in the system would also encourage users to stay actively engaged in the forums and up-to-date on tech in their areas of expertise.
User feedback
Displaying a user’s group-specific stats on their replies within that group would make it easy for others to see their contributions within a specific tech area (ex. Windows 10), but what was the best format for this info? I put a few UI options in front of users in our feedback group to see which they found easiest to understand.
While power users understand abbreviations, some newer users (and guests) might be confused by what a “BA” or “HV” is, like in example #1. So those terms would need to be written out.
Breaking up the stats with icons made them easier to scan, unlike example #3 where it’s all text.
Putting the stats in a hover-popover like in example #4 would add to the number of hover-popover on topics annoying readers and hide that info where it’s not easy to find (especially on mobile!).
The best advice I ever heard was "Keep It Simple Stupid."
Go with 2. Simple. Intuitive. No need for any special clicks, hovers, hold down the function key while pressing the 7 and 11 key while you realize your keyboard is not as cool as mine and does not have an 11 key.
It lays it out rather easily with little room for misinterpretation or confusion. Only people with bad eyesight have any complaint.
Example UI for showing a user’s group stats on their replies.
After a few tweaks we were able to quickly release the experiment into a few of the more active and highly-trafficked groups to see how our metrics might be affected. We were pleased to see an increase in engagement on topics where user’s had their group stats shown, more replies and helpful votes make it easier to find an answer quickly!
Results
One major consideration that we learned through this experiment is that the volume of engagement across user groups varies so being able to control the thresholds for “experts” in each group was going to be important. Some groups have a smaller audience (niche tech) so their stats are going to be lower than a group focused on, for example, Windows 10.
With the success of showing user stats on topic replies in select technical groups we released the feature into production for all technical groups. We’ve already seen positive feedback from Community members who find it helpful in seeing who is an “expert” in a particular group (and why!) so they can more quickly assess the quality of a reply. We also added a leaderboard to each group page so users can see who the “experts” are in each tech group (who doesn’t love a bit of gamification and competition?).
Oh man, I am going to need to start answering questions again. I'm not listed as an expert for anything :(
– Spiceworks Community user, Habanero spice-level
This is very nice! Sometimes I want to see responses/answers from more knowledgeable folks for that subject.
(In Sean Connery’s voice) This is Noice, vewy noice!
– Spiceworks Community user, Serrano spice-level