Cover photo credit: http://entrepreneurialmoms.org/?p=29
Quora is one of my favorite resources for learning. I really enjoy how professionals with hands-on experience can share their knowledge on this platform. For instance, you can find a previous Facebook Product Manager sharing Facebook’s growth strategy in their early days. This type of content doesn’t exist anywhere else.
I noticed that this type of content is usually marked with “star” signs. Quora calls them “Best Sources,” denoting them as the best source of knowledge on the internet. After discovering this feature, I found myself continually looking for them as I used Quora. However, finding these best sources is difficult, as there is no centralized view for browsing them.
In this post, I will walk through how I designed a feature that allows users to browse Quora’s best sources in one place. I call this feature “the Best of Quora.”
Analysis of User Needs
To visualize the target users of my new feature and design with them in mind, I am going to create a persona.
Meet George.
George is a Quora user who is thirsty for knowledge but short on time. George wants an efficient way to find and absorb the best sources of information related to his interests. My feature, “the Best of Quora,” will help him accomplish this goal.
Design Process
To meet the user need identified above, I will design a feature. My design process involves creating:
- epic stories,
- detailed design stories,
- task flows,
- wireframes, and finally
- prototypes.
This process allows me to focus on just the right amount of details every step of the way.
Epic Story
An epic story is a high-level, one-sentence description of a feature.
The epic stories of “the Best of Quora” feature are:
- A user can browse his favorite topics’ best-source content in one place.
- A user can browse one topic’s best-source content in one place.
Design stories
Design stories describes ways users could interact with a feature. Compared with epic stories, they contain a lot more details.
The design stories of “the Best of Quora” feature are:
The basics
- A user can view best sources of his/her interest on one aggregated page.
- A user can view best sources of any topic on one aggregated page.
- If there is no content for a best-source page, a user can learn how to mark existing content as best source on the page.
Mark best sources
Best sources are determined both algorithmically and manually. Questions with highly-voted answers or from proven writers are marked as best sources algorithmically. In order to surface new writers or new questions, manual voting is needed.
- A user has to provide reasons from a predefined list when marking a question as best source.
- A user can provide reasons and unmark a question as best source.
- Proper error messages are shown if any of the operations fail.
- A user has one opportunity to mark a question as the best source. If another user unmarks the question, this user won’t be able mark the question as the best source again. This is to discourage the contention between users with different opinions.
Moderating best sources
- A topic administrator can review the newly marked/unmarked best source, which overwrites a normal user’s mark.
In this design exploration, I will only focus on displaying and marking best sources and skip the admin part.
Task Flow
I used a task flow to map out users’ activities and decisions when they use this feature.
Click here to expand the image.
Wireframes
Based on the task flows, I created the following wireframes to visualize the pages and their different states.
I started by exploring the potential options to expose this feature. The option 1 (Figure 3) is to expose the feature as a drop down and the option 2 (Figure 4) is to place the feature side by side with Top Stories.
I decided to go with the option 2 because of the potential feature discoverability issue with the option 1.
After this exploration, I created the following wireframes.
Prototype
Below is the prototype of the best source pages and how a question is unmarked as best source.
Iteration, iteration and Iteration
At this point, all the basics of the feature are in place. However, I wonder how this feature would impact users’ behavior in the existing system. Will there be any side effects?
In my next post, I will explain three design iterations I did with this question in mind.
I don’t work for Quora. I am just in love with the product. This is one of my projects while leveling up my UX skills 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.
