In October, we ran this year’s round of Community-a-thon. As in previous years, the purpose is for staff to step into the shoes of community members and experience what it’s like to ask, answer, edit, flag, and generally experience the network as a regular user.
Our goals remain the same:
- Build empathy by seeing the platform from a user’s perspective
- Encourage ongoing participation from staff beyond the event itself
- Collect concrete feedback and bug reports that can help improve the Stack Exchange experience
Higher participation from staff
We put a lot of effort into communicating a lot and building momentum leading up to community-a-thon, which helped us see a big increase in staff participation this year. Since last year’s event we also began including an introduction to engaging on the platform as one of the on-boarding sessions for all new hires, which has helped new staff become comfortable using the sites from the start. We have also been highlighting staff contributions across the network in internal newsletter, to help encourage participation throughout the year.
What staff noticed while using the sites
Staff feedback centered around several common themes, much of which related to the intuitiveness of using the platform. Specifically, staff encountered challenges including:
- Ease of navigating between multiple sites
- Where to find chat entry points
- How to interpret question draft warnings
- Using the platform on mobile
In addition to this general feedback, staff also caught several bugs that have been triaged to the appropriate teams, including an issue where users trying to join additional sites were prompted to create a new account, rather than simply join the community with their existing account.
Many of these are not brand-new issues and have been raised by community members before. Community-a-thon helps a wider range of staff experience those same rough edges first-hand and better understand how they impact everyday use of the platform.
We can’t promise a specific timeline, but we do hope to address many of these issues (and more) as we continue to iterate on site design and functionality.
Next Steps
Past Community-a-thons have already shaped some of our internal practices mentioned above, such as incorporating platform walkthroughs into new-hire onboarding and highlighting staff contributors each quarter. We want to continue building that progress. Our ongoing intentions are for this event to:
- Ground internal product discussions in real user experience
- Keep staff connected to the day-to-day reality of the network and its users
- Feed new insights into ongoing product and policy conversations, even when changes take time
After debriefing how the event went, we came away with a set of ideas to explore for next year’s Community-a-thon, with the goal of continuing to grow participation and helping staff gain more insights from the experience. We look forward to improving the process further next year.
Thank you again to everyone in the community who interacted with staff during the event (whether or not you realized it, since many staff participate using personal accounts without a staff badge). Whether you answered questions, left comments, flagged issues, or shared your own feedback on Meta, your participation is always appreciated.
If you have additional thoughts on this year’s Community-a-thon or ideas for how we can make future iterations more useful (for both you and us), please feel free to share them in an answer below.
