👋🏼 Hey! I’m Des. I’ve been here at Stack for a little while now (4 years and some change) and just recently started working much more closely with the Public Q&A product team as Director of Product, Public Platform. Working within Teresa’s organization, I'm responsible for setting the overall strategy for the Public Q&A Platform. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working closely with our development and research teams to ramp up on our current initiatives and gain a better understanding of user needs and pain points. I still have a lot to learn! But I’m thrilled to be working with this team (and you!) and look forward to sharing more with you here :)

As mentioned in Teresa’s Q1 roadmap post, we’re working on making changes to how the question closing system works on Stack Overflow so that it’s a friendlier experience and more educational for post authors, while making it easier to edit and reopen closed questions, and reduce the burden on curators.

Why are we doing this?

Our research has shown that often users hesitate to ask questions on Stack Overflow due to the fear of public, and sometimes caustic, feedback. From curators, we often hear about the time-consuming burden of manually guiding users whose questions get closed, and sometimes receiving pushback when they are just trying to help. And from moderators, we’ve heard the ask to reduce toxicity for all users through improved moderation and communication tools.

Today on Stack Overflow, roughly 20% of questions are edited after they are closed and just 3% of closed questions are ever reopened. We’d like to see more questions improved upon so that they have a better chance of being reopened and answered.

Our research and design team took a closer look at the problem, considered previously proposed solutions and feedback, and came up with what a long-term solution might look like. Then we broke it down into phases so that we can solicit feedback, test, and iterate along the way rather than take months on end to get something out there.

Goals

The goal of this project is to update existing close workflows with a streamlined system which is easier to understand and follow for all users and results in fewer negative interactions between them.

Askers are often unsure how to get their question reopened and onsite guidance can be confusing. They often experience a pile-on effect of downvotes and comments while trying to edit their question in parallel. This can feel overwhelming and intimidating for question askers and drive-by visitors.

Curators are burdened with an enormous backlog of tasks. We want to reduce the burden by helping question askers improve the quality of their question through product guidance, relieving curators of this tedious and often thankless task. We will also be testing automatic reopening, putting the onus on the question asker to improve and reopen their question and explore the notion of “hidden” as opposed to “closed” questions, giving askers the space to (somewhat more) privately improve their questions. More details on these concepts are below.

Things we’re not doing

As a quick call out, we’re not planning the following:

• Network wide roll out - This project addresses pain points experienced on Stack Overflow. We’ll need to better understand the needs of the other network sites as this solution may not be needed, nor appropriate for other sites with less traffic and peer-to-peer friction. As of now, we don’t have any set plans in the nearterm to roll this out to the network. Having said that, if there are parts of this project that can relatively easily be rolled out to the network, we’ll try to prioritize them.

• Automatic closures - We won’t be automatically closing questions. Questions will still need to be voted on for closure.

• Getting rid of question closing - We have no intention of removing the question closing feature, and continue to embrace our commitment to maintaining high quality content on the site.

Feature Overview

Outlined below are the key components to this project. And a bit further down, I provide more detail on how we’ve phased this project out. While the team has validated the general direction through user, historical, and competitor research, we want to test these ideas and get feedback where we can along the way. Here are the key components of this project.

1. Close UX improvements

We’d like to reconceive “closed” as “hidden” so that users can improve their question without feeling embarrassed or exposed. It’s a gentler way to remove a low quality question from general visibility while giving the author a chance to edit it. Privileged users (mods and high rep users) will have a path to access these questions to provide additional coaching and guidance. We are still toying with ideas for what this path looks like, and we welcome your suggestions!

Inbox notifications and emails will alert post authors of newly hidden posts and provide guidance for editing. To maintain quality, if hidden posts aren’t edited within a certain timeframe, they will be deleted. And to mitigate abuse, we’d like to explore dynamic vote thresholds for closing based on age so that newer questions require fewer votes to close than older questions.

Email notification

2. Edit UX Improvements

This new editing UX will provide guidance tailored to the specific reason the question was closed. We believe that this will help users make substantial edits that increase the likelihood of getting an answer. For askers, they get clear guidance about how to edit and reopen their question and ideally have a better experience on the site. For other editors, based on explanations in the "closed" post notice, they’ll know how to rehabilitate the question and help the question author. Changes to post notices have been rolling out over the last several months. We'll be continuously refining the content we show here based on user feedback.

You’ll notice the updated editor borrows UI patterns from the new Ask a Question form.

Edit form, draft step

Edit form, review step

3. Automatic Reopening

When a user edits a hidden question in a substantial way, it will automatically reopen (unhide) the question and return to its pre-close, public state. Additionally, a question can only be automatically reopened once. Any subsequent reopens would require review through the reopen queue.

Here is a clickable prototype that illustrates these three core pieces. Note that final designs and copy may change.

##Iterative and Incremental Development

The close-to-reopen workflow is a multi-touch process. In order to understand the impact of these various changes, to minimize disruption for users, and to avoid being in development for a lengthy period of time, we’re taking both an incremental (break the project down in smaller pieces) and iterative (continue to refine as progress is made) approach. Here’s how we’ve planned things so far.

The first phase, scheduled to release over the next couple of weeks, is much more solidified. Whereas each subsequent phase is less so, giving us room to adjust based one the data and feedback we see.

Phase 1

This first phase is made up of foundational changes and does not yet introduce the new concepts of automatic reopen or hidden questions. These are things we’d likely do anyway and provide the groundwork for the other phases.

• Updates to close/off topic dialogue reasons

• Updated editor for closed questions - pulling from the new Ask a Question design pattern, this provides better guidance through the editing flow.

• Email and inbox notifications about closed questions - users will first receive an inbox notification when their question is closed. If the inbox notification isn’t seen, an email is sent to encourage them to make edits.

Phase 2

This phase introduces automatic reopening of questions when they’ve been substantially edited and passes questions with more than one closure to the reopen queue. At this stage, we plan to do some quantitative and qualitative testing to understand the impact automatic reopening has on askers (are questions more likely to be answered? closed again?) and curators (do we see a decline in low quality flags? are higher quality questions making it to the queue?). Deletion and dynamic thresholds for closing will be explored during this phase.

Phase 3

Reconceiving “closed” as “hidden.” When a question receives sufficient votes to become hidden:

• The post is hidden for primary views. Post authors and privileged users would have a direct path to view and edit. Anyone with a direct link can still access it as well.
• Score and voting capabilities are removed.
• Post notices, inbox notifications, and emails are all updated to reflect the new language.
• If the question isn’t reopened, it’s deleted after a certain period of time.

This step will also be an important piece to test and iterate on.

##Questions & feedback

As mentioned, these phases are a rough outline of how we plan to tackle this project over the coming months. We plan to share our findings with you here at each milestone and get feedback along the way. For now, we’re happy to hear your thoughts or any concerns you have, as an answer below.

It should be noted that we still have some open questions that need discovery and you might think of something we’ve missed so feedback on things not mentioned here would be great. For example, what should we do with existing closed questions? There are lots of close questions today on Stack Overflow and we hear that users still find them helpful.

Thanks all for taking the time to read this and provide feedback at this stage.