Quora
Helping great communities to succeed
Desktop web • mobile web • iOS
Quora is made of up of millions of individual questions, answers, and posts, making it difficult to find content and people that specifically interests you. In 2020, Quora allowed users to create communities called Spaces to allow like-minded individuals to come together around shared interests and tastes. There are hundreds of thousands of Spaces for users to choose from, many with >1 million followers engaging with them and nearly 1/3 of all users following at least one Space.
My role
Design lead, ideation & research, strategy, systems design, data analysis
Team
1 product manager, 2-3 engineers, 1 data scientist, 1 user researcher
Timeline
Jan 2020 – Mar 2021
Overview
Problem
Users were suggested communities, or Spaces, to follow in their feed, distributed by algorithms that assumed the more followers a Space has, the higher quality it was. This caused low-quality Spaces to rapidly grow, while new or high-quality Spaces struggled to gain followers. Spaces had an extremely low-retention rates as well, due to 1) users following Spaces that do not align with their interests or 2) popular Spaces containing low-quality content.
Previous design of “Discover new Spaces” in feed
Goal
Help new and high-quality communities, or Spaces, grow through intentional Space follows by increasing Space visits and improving Space content quality, contributing towards the company’s long-term engagement and retention goals.
Explorations
Data findings
When exploring why Spaces had low retention rates, data showed that the majority of Space follows occurred before a user even sees content from the Space. This was happening primarily due to users directly following a suggested Space shown in feed, before clicking on the Space to explore whether or not the content and quality aligned with their interests.
To ensure users were intentionally following Space, the ability to follow a Space from feed without seeing its content was removed. This forced a user to visit a Space and explore its content and quality before following it. Intentional Space follows were measured through tracking Space follower retention and engagement rates 1 week after a user follows a Space.
Systems design
The solutions needed to simultaneously benefit two audiences for significant metric impact: creators and followers. To increase Space follows from followers, the system needed to motivate creators to build high-quality Spaces, and similarly, to motivate creators to invest in building their Spaces, the Space needed to gain followers relatively quickly.
In order to help great Spaces grow, the strategy focused on a cyclical reinforcing wheel to increase Space visits and improve Space content quality.
Solutions
Increase Space visits
The primary way to to direct people to explore Spaces that they might be interested in was through showing suggested Spaces in a “Discover new Spaces” section within feed. Compared to the previous design, the UI was improved to use a list view to display more Spaces in view, while adding relevant metadata information and tags to help categorize and filter Spaces.
Content from Spaces the system thinks the user is interested is often shown in feed. By adding follow mechanics to a feed story header and a banner when visiting a Space they do not follow, users are encouraged to follow Spaces with content they like and unfollow Spaces with irrelevant content for a more tailored feed experience.
Notifications are also significant drivers of traffic to a Space. The notification settings did not support an email option, but by adding this option, Space creators were able to send newsletters to their followers. Additionally, new Space notifications were added, such as recommended Spaces, while improving their send mechanics.
Discover new Spaces in feed
+45% increase in Space page visits from feed, leading to a +20% increase in intentional Space follows and ~0.5% increase in active feed engagement metrics
Adding follow Spaces feed story header and banner
+3% increase in intentional Space follows and 5% increase in Space unfollows, resulting in ~0.05% increase in feed engagement
Revamping space notification mechanics
+15% increase in Space visits and -10% decrease in Space notifications disabled – Added the ability for Spaces to generate revenue with paid email newslettersImprove Spaces content quality
Great Spaces for readers to consume and for the system to distribute are dependent on the ability for Space creators to curate successful Spaces with high content quality. While creators implicitly learn what a good Space is through suggested Spaces in the product, explicitly on-boarding creators by teaching them how to set up a Space is much more impactful.
We initially architected a Spaces leaderboard to recognize the top Spaces over the last month to invoke healthy competition between Space creators to create the best Spaces, rewarded with more visibility and user traffic. Readers also benefited by being able to find the best Spaces for a topic more easily. Developing a consistent ranking system proved difficult though, so the leaderboard was re-purposed to show the most viewed writers for a topic or Space instead.
On-boarding new Space creators
+25% tasks completion rate, for a 65% total Space on-boarding completion rate, -30% decrease in Space creator drop-off – 15% increase in Spaces content distributed in feed, resulting in a +0.05% increase in overall feed engagement
Motivating creators through reward and competition
+2.5% increase in Space visits and +12% increase in Space creator retentionOutcomes
Impact
+62.5% increase in Space visits, leading to a +28% increase in intentional Space follows
+0.6% increase in active feed engagement, contributing towards a +$600k increase in revenue per year