I’d like to explore how we might improve the experience of our support categories – Support and all of its subcategories.
A couple recent discussions[1] have focused on how we might more consistently use the solved plugin to mark posts as the solutions in these topics, and I imagine we’ll identify some small tactical changes to make as part of this discussion, like tuning certain existing settings.
But first, I want to take a step back and discuss the purpose of these categories, who engages in them, and what different needs they have.
A place where people can ask questions about how to solve a particular problem using Discourse and get help from the rest of the community
A place where people can find answers questions they have that have already been asked
A place where people who enjoy helping others can offer help, and in the process, demonstrate the knowledge they have, engage with others like them, and challenge themselves to learn new things in the process of helping
A place where people who want to make Discourse better can learn about what problems people are having and identify opportunities to improve the product
That’s a start – I’m interested in people’s feedback on the above. If you participate in these categories, and would describe your circumstances and motivations for your participation differently, please share. That’s helpful context for us all to think about the design of these spaces.
In the discussion below, I’d like to shift to more concrete feedback about what isn’t working as well as we’d like, and/or suggestions about how we might improve these categories. When doing so, let’s try to share our perspective on who’s needs we’re trying to better meet with any change.
I want to kick things off here with this observation:
We could start with the assumption that it is valuable to be marking posts as solutions, and focus on what the best approach is to reach that state more consistently, but before we do that, I’m interested in hearing what folks think about these questions, keeping in mind the different people I outlined in the first post:
Why is it important to mark answers as solutions? Who gets what value out of that and in what scenarios?
I think things that are obvious to regular users of this forum (or any Discourse forum) maybe seem very intuitive or obvious but to a new user may not be so obvious.
Considering the four types of users above who may use the Support category, the first two are people seeking answers to a problem or exploring features for a possible solution to their community needs.
Of this group of users, some maybe just starting out, some may know their way around a little but still getting started and some may be Discourse power users researching advanced configurations.
That first group, folks who have never seen Discourse or are just starting to learn, may have no idea what a solved button is, what it’s purpose is or why it matters if they click it or not.
Some maybe desperate to solve one particular problem and once solved, never return to the forum. Are these user’s topic a waste of time? No, because they represent pain points that could make or break the decision as to whether to use Discourse or abandon it.
I’ve been brainstorming ideas lately, nothing good yet but I did have one idea where for tl0s/first-time posters in solved categories they see a prompt over the solved button that says something like “Did this solve your problem?” if they say a specific keyword like “thanks”, “this worked/solved”, etc. That might help with engagement but In still not sure how more clear a bug solved button can be?
I think we can assume that getting the answer was valuable to the person in this scenario, but what is in it for to them to mark a solution?
Possibilities:
They understand it’s a social norm, and want to make a good impression in case they have another question in the future
They want to give explicit recognition to the person who helped them, and understand that people are more willing to help when they are recognized in this way
They want to avoid getting additional responses – by marking a solution, they can make it clear they don’t need more responses or questions from people
They want to get additional responses when they don’t mark it solved. By marking a solution, they help boost the signal of unanswered topics more clearly.
Are there others?
Now… another possibility is the answer is just “not much”. We could accept that for the person asking the question, it’s simply not that important to mark a solution.
There’s some overlap with that assumption and this one:
They want to avoid getting additional responses – by marking a solution, they can make it clear they don’t need more responses or questions from people
The “nag” features some systems have seem to be designed with that assumption in mind. “You’re gonna keep getting nagged until you mark a solution – that’s what’s in it for you, buddy”
And, if one were to go that route, I think we’d need to be more confident in two things:
Even if it’s not so important to the person who asked, there’s enough value for others in having solutions be marked, that it’s worth doing that.
Alternatives are limited or not effective enough (marking solutions automatically or having helpers or staff mark solutions instead)
Could/should the nudge help frame why it’s valuable for them to mark a solution?
How might you go about framing that to one of these users?
This. My arrival in Discourse world is still fresh enough that I can tell you I found the interface (as a user here on Meta) quite confusing and overwhelming, and it’s not just because of the brain injury
There is a lot going on on the screen, and it’s great when you’re familiar with it because it allows you to do so much, but it’s really « noisy » when you’re just arriving. (Related: a topic somewhere — where? That’s the brain — where we toyed with the idea of a super pared down them for TL0/1 users for example.)
nothing to add, just an additional data point from non-Meta Discourse forum experience
I hung out in another Discourse forum for a few years. It was an open source home automation software support forum. I guess they didn’t have or know about the ‘solved’ component. We used to encourage folks to put the word ‘solved’ in upper case in square brackets in the title of the topic. There was no solved button.
With some encouragement from other users, most did mark their question as solved.
This seemed to grow out of a few regular users who simply got sick of answering the same questions over and over.
What I noticed from watching on a daily basis was that a new user would show up, ask a very specific question, get some answers, try a few things, maybe post again asking more questions, then suddenly disappear. I began intuitively realizing that when they would go missing, they must have figured it out.
They might also not realise, if they’re new, that they are allowed to mark a response as a solution. It’s not obvious. Social norms take time to sink in. I only recently in my Discourse journey started using the solved button, and I recall refraining previously because I wasn’t quite certain when it was appropriate to do so and if it was my role.
If you’ve just arrived in a community, using a platform you’re not familiar with, and you’re struggling with your own issues trying to set it up for your own needs, the chances you are going to stop and try and figure out if that solved button is there for you or not are slim.
Could the solved plugin automatically chase the author (via PM) to mark a post as the solution if the topic is responded to and there hasn’t, for example, been another post for a period of time (and no marked solution)?
That chase could include instructions on how to do this?
That chase could also appear below the topic for the author after a set number of replies?
Some statistics on how long it usually takes for a marked solution to appear in terms of time and number of posts might help tune an automated solution.
This was my experience as well. My first few posts here were edited by others, often for a really minor typo, and it gave me the impression that I’d done something wrong so I was reluctant to use the solved button in case I’d get that wrong too. When I was struggling to understand what the problem I was having even was, it wasn’t intuitive that I was allowed to mark my own question solved.
I think just a box (like reactikns) over the solved button that says like “Did this reply answer your question? Marking a solution helps users with similar issues quickly navigate to the solution.” should be good enough?
I’d be interested in what you think this might look like.
In lieu of having a built in feature for this, I’m imagining we lean on process first (like what we were discussing in the gardening topic that preceded this discussion).
What if, for example, some of us periodically made a sweep for topics that look like they might be solved, and do the following:
post message nudging the topic author to mark a solution
set a reminder for two days later
if no answer, make our best guess – mark it ourselves and close topic
That’d give us room to experiment with the messaging, while we assess if these nudges are valuable.
I think this suggested copy for the feature we’re currently imaging is a good place to start.
Then, if that feels like it’s helpful, we can revisit how we might build this into the product itself – which would certainly be more scalable longer term.
I think @darkpixlz 's suggestion is good, something that says “hey, did you get an answer to your question? if you did, would be nice to mark it as solved to help others” (that’s the idea).
(was that your question?)
I think that’s a good idea, and not too difficult to implement if there are people willing to do the sweeping.
Actually I am just remembering this now but wasn’t there something blocking the timeline before that said something like that? I would always write css to hide it because it was persistent and annoying but I never see it anymore. The idea wasn’t bad, just the execution wasn’t so great (blocking the timeline and not pointing out a post in specific is not ideal)
