How can Quora better serve busy professionals?

— A Design Exploration (Part 2 — Iterations)

Cover photo credit: http://entrepreneurialmoms.org/?p=29

In my previous post, I shared my design process for a feature called “the Best of Quora.” After I finished designing the basics, I wondered how this new feature might impact users’ behaviors in the existing system. Will there be any side effects? With this question in mind, I created three design iterations.

Iteration 1: Balance time spent between new questions and best sources.

When the best sources are all in one place, will users still spend as much time on the traditional feed? George, our persona, won’t because he is tight on time. If users spend less time on the traditional feed, how can we ensure new questions get answers and new answers get votes? There has to be a balance.

Here is how I propose to balance users’ time spent between the best source feed and the traditional feed.

• After a user views 10 best source questions from the “Best Source” page, credits will be charged to view additional content from the “Best Source” page. (The threshold “10" needs to be fine tuned through experiments.) The goal of these free best source views is to hook users on the content. Then later, when they run out of credit, they can be motivated to earn credit by performing actions on the traditional feed.
• When a user runs out of credit, they will be prompted with ways to earn credit.

Accordingly, the task flow is updated with the red boxes:

Figure 1. Updated task flow with limits on the number of views of the content on the Best Source pages.

Click here to expand the image.

When a user runs out of free best source views and credit, this UI (Figure 2) will be shown when they tap on a question from the best source page. The purpose is to encourage users to earn credits through contributing to the system. Currently, users can earn credit via

• getting followers to their questions,
• getting upvotes on their answers, OR
• waiting until the credits refill over time.

I am going to stay with these existing ways to earn credits in my design.

Figure 2. The experience when a user runs out of credit while attempting to read the Best of Quora.

Iteration 2: inform users the credit charge mechanism ahead of time

It may take a while for users to receive the credit they earn in my first design iteration, even if they take action right away. Delayed gratification is not a good experience.

A better experience is to warn users early so that they are not surprised when the credit runs out.

I explored two different approaches:

Approach 1. Prompt users when they are low on credit.

Figure 3. Prompt users to earn credits when they are low on credit

Approach 2. Prompt users when they use “the Best of Quora” feature for the first time.

Figure 4. prompt users to earn credit when they read the Best of Quora for the first time.

Approach 1 provides actionable steps for users in the context of running out of credit. Therefore, I continued with approach 1 with the design stories below:

• Users are notified of the credit charging mechanism when they are low on credit.
• Users are reminded with a warning for as long as they are low on credit.

Figure 5. The wireframe for option 1.

Iteration 3: Encourage users to form a credit earning habit.

Iteration 1 and 2 explored ways to prompt users to take action. Is there a more natural way to encourage users to earn credits by contributing content so that their credits will never run out?

Here are some ideas:

• Add an entry point to “ask” in search. When people search, theyintend to look for something. If there is no match in the search results, it is very natural for people to ask questions in this context. So I added an entry point to ask a question right above the fold.

Figure 6. Insert an option to ask questions during the search experience.

• Reward high quality answers. When people’s answers are voted up, celebrate it with a notification. This will give users who write high quality content a great sense of achievement and will therefore encourage the behavior.

Figure 7. Reward users for their high quality answers.

Next steps

I started this project with the simple goal of creating one central place for Quora users to view the best content. I found the real challenge to be organically integrating the new feature into the existing app. Through multiple design iterations, I identified and addressed three issues:

• How can I ensure users still spend enough time on the traditional feed in order to surface the new content?
• How can I avoid the surprise of running out of credit?
• How can I encourage users to form content contribution habits so that they earn credit organically?

After these iterations, I found it is still possible for users to run into a dead end if a topic only has few best sources. I believe we need a new systematic approach to encourage users to write more high quality content. I will explore ways to create such a system in my next post.

P.S. If you like this post, please don’t forget to recommend or tweet. ☺

I don’t work for Quora. I am just in love with the product. This is one of my projects while taking my UX skills to the next level at Tradecraft. I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have regarding this post. You can email me at daisy@tradecrafted.com or tweet me.

Big thanks to Gabriel Dillon for the copy editing.