A more engaging comments experience

Comments are a crucial feature in any social internet product, and for Quora, they play a vital role in fulfilling its mission to “share and grow the world’s knowledge” by enabling content production with a low barrier to entry through user perspectives on posts and answers. As the PM and Lead Product Designer for this project, I defined the scope to focus primarily on revamping the comments reading experience to amplify metric wins from peripheral teams focused on comment ranking, and secondarily, on improving the writing experience. I ensured the project aligned with leadership’s product strategy and direction and collaborated with cross-functional teams for engineering staffing. Our top-level metric was to increase feed engagement, with a primary OKR of boosting comment impressions by 5% through increased comment views, upvotes, and expands.

User research revealed several issues with the existing comment experience: it felt unsocial, the UI was outdated and disconnected from the story, and the threading system was confusing. To address these, we revamped the reading experience by surfacing comments from followed users in feed directly, modernizing the UI for better readability and connectivity to the feed story, and simplifying the threading system and comment reply expansions. We also made the comments action bar consistent with the feed action bar, removing huge confusions, eliminating different button stylings and major confusions like having upvoters next to the downvote button. These iterative experiments resulted in more than a 5% increase in comment engagement, through increasing expands and upvotes, leading to a 0.02% increase in feed engagement and a $20k increase in revenue.

For the writing experience, we redesigned the input field to make adding comments easier to detect while maintaining a seamless separation between the feed story and its comments. Additionally, the new comment reply modal allowed users to see the comment they were responding to inline. Collectively, these enhancements increased new comments added by 1.5%. Additionally, we tried to address the landing experience for comments and the inconsistency in how comments were displayed when initially expanded, whether inline or in a modal. Inline comments pushed down feed content, negatively affecting feed story engagement, while the outdated modal design required extensive engineering resources to update to using native device modals. Overall though, within a quarter, our targeted improvements successfully enhanced the comments experience, making it more engaging and user-friendly and encouraging users to not only read, but also contribute their knowledge to Quora.