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How should we redesign Contribute?

When we redesigned the site last week, we dropped the link to Contribute from the header. We did this for two reasons:

  1. It wasn't working very well — I don't think it's a good introduction to contributing to the community
  2. Not very many people used it — it gets much less traffic than the other main sections of iFixit

We want to redesign the page, and center it around community activity that's going on now, as well as tangible things that people can do to help right now.

So I've got a few questions:

  1. What would you like to see on a brand new Community page?
  2. What would be most useful to you?
  3. How can we best get new folks up to speed and earning reputation?
  4. Where should we be pointing people who want to pitch in?
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Four Responses:

What would you like to see on a brand new Community page?

  • Activities to promote on Community page (in order of importance). (Even this might be too much for one page):
    1. Guides in progress: For me, this is the whole point of the page.
    2. Guides needed
    3. Questions with no answers
    4. Unresolved questions

What would be most useful to you?

  • For "guides in progress", I'd like a roadmap for how to make a guide awesome! Every guide should have a few key elements. Right now, if it's missing something we mark it with a flag that denotes what exactly is lacking (improper grammar, missing photos, etc...). I'd like to see something closer to what Stack Exchange has done to stage it's community sites. Each site has a goal, something that'll signify it has reached a certain level of adequacy. To get there, they point out all the areas where a fledgeling community site is deficient in order to encourage the site's core supporters to step up. A repair guide is analogous (in some ways) to that kind of community site. The iFixit community needs a fun way to be encouraged to fix up a manual in need.
  • Here are some things Stack Exchange does well:

How can we best get new folks up to speed and earning reputation?

  • Getting started: I think there are three things needed to start contributing on iFixit. Here they are alongside some ways we could help people get started quicker:
    1. A knowledge of the software
      • If your mother doesn't know what a summary is on a guide, how can she hope to add one? Each deficiency of a guide (i.e.: "no summary") should link directly to how to fix it. In the "no summary" example, clicking on a guide under the "no summary" section should link directly to the edit view where the potential contributor is asked to start typing a summary and is presented with a pop up tutorial about what a summary is. The help documentation is amazing but we shouldn't expect new users to wade through it to understand the purpose for and how to edit simple things like summaries.
    2. An understanding of how to help
    3. Recognition for their effort
      • After every contribution, users should feel a sense of accomplishment. IFixit should celebrate user actions better through more event-triggered emails, site notifications and user activity updates.
  • Earning reputation: What I'd like to see would require a more, over-arching change to the site. First, allow users to define areas of interest (I'm a fan of home improvement, carpentry, and furniture repair). Once that's in place, give them daily or weekly suggestions for questions, answers, guides and stories that fall into those interest categories. A major thing the site seems to be lacking is sticky transactional emails. A site that has great community engagement (Snapguide.com, for example) usually seems to excel at these. If I have to dive through a site to find areas where I can lend a hand, I'll be far less inclined to do it consistently; hence, feeding me a list of the most choice content (geared to me) would be far-more encouraging.

Where should we be pointing people who want to pitch in?

  • Getting started: Similar to my thought in the "earning reputation" part of question 3–- the site would be more encouraging if it better directed me to the areas of the site where I had existing interest or expertise. If I state that I have interest in "carpentry" or "soldering"––or alternatively-- if I have completed guides or answered questions in those areas, then I could:
    • Have a dashboard of content relevant to my interests/experience
    • Receive a daily/weekly email of items in those areas
    • Be ranked as against other tinkerers in certain interests / areas of expertise (nothing motivates like a little competition)
  • Also, allowing users to post a GDGT-like portfolio of the gadgets they own will present opportunities to encourage users to:
    1. Work together to document the gadgets they own
    2. Ask other device owners when troubleshooting problems
    3. Check out the repair manuals for devices they own
    4. Share repair stories for their devices

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1 Comment:

Tim and I worked on a class project that calculated similarities between Answers posts. Another team was working on programmatically determining a user's interests. The idea was to combine the two to give focus to questions a user is particularly suited to answer.

It never got production-ready, though, so it's sitting in a dustbin somewhere waiting for someone to work on it.

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Contribute is a very important page to our university students. Many instructors and students choose to do an "editing-only" version of the technical writing project, especially on their first round. Students use the Contribute page to find things to work on, propose them to us, and then we flag them for student use.

Currently, the Contribute page has no way of showing a list of guides with many of the flags. You have to do this by direct URL. It would be great to have a drop-down or some other way for users and students to access all the guides with any of the flags that require correction. Most of the flags displayed are for guides that require a lot of work. Easy access to guides that simply need a polish on the grammar side of things will help users start with an simple task. Completing simple tasks will build rep and confidence to complete more difficult tasks and corrections.

Some feed into Answers would be helpful. We know that a lot of people find iFixit through Answers, so we want those pages looking sharp. Providing an easy way for people to get to questions that need responses would be a great start in that direction. We need to make the process of contributing clear, maybe by adding an intro video, or visual design to help you figure out what to do with the overwhelming list of guides that need help.

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Kyle Wiens will be eternally grateful.