January 2018

Done

Ask a question template: We launched an AaQ template experiment on 2017-12-01. That experiment is done. We will post a summary of the results this month and will continue work in this area with a second experiment that we are still designing.

Review Queue Indicator improvements: We added some optimization for better review queue notifications on lower traffic sites and we reduced false flags by making sure that you're not notified about review queues that need attention if you don't have access to them at your rep level.

Response to top bar feedback pt 1: We fixed a number of small, but annoying issues with the top bar including:

• Made the top bar the same height across all sites (including SO)
• Fixed middle click behavior on the icons
• Added relevant links to inbox and review queue menus
• Brought back the bounce to the indicators on the icons
• Toned down colors to reduce emphasis on the search box
• Omnipresent help icon

Winter Bash: The hats are now all back in their boxes. You can take them out and admire them, but you can't put them back on.

Site theme standardization investigation: As the investigation on navigation improvements and responsive design progressed, we realized that the current level of theming for some graduated network sites creates a lot of fragility. While most sites have limited theming, a few sites are extensively themed. We evaluated some approaches to theming last month and this month we will engage with the community the future of theming on network sites. The short version is we want to continue supporting individual site themes, but we need to pare down what can be customized so that we can have a consistent experience, a single code base with less fragility and a quicker path to deploying core improvements across the network. We will be communicating later this month more details on the impact and timing of the next steps in this area.

In progress

Response to top bar feedback pt 2: We are wrapping up the final top bar fix based on your feedback. Soon the Inbox, Achievements, Review queue and site switcher menus will progressively render so that people on slow connections have a better experience.

Channels features: TeamDAG is working on a variety of features related for our Channels product. This includes ask a question experience, optimizations for question list views, navigation, channel newsletters, and a long list of other enhancements that will make Channels work well. It is worth a note that while some of this work is only for the private channels experience, many of these features will find their way to all public Q&A sites as well.

Tag subscriptions: We're done specing an improved tag subscription experience that was inspired by our Enterprise product. We will start building this feature so that the public site, enterprise, and Filtered questions functionality can be unified into one coherent experience. Coding will start this month.

Starting in January

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Responsive design: We are wrapping up this investigation and moving into the coding phase. We have a nice prototype that will guide our work. There is an amazing amount of work required to do this right and it's easy to break things. This work will be done in phases starting with the most commonly used experiences. This effort is connected to our navigation improvements and channels work. (Check out what is responsive design for more background.)

Facebook auth updates: Facebook is updating their auth requirements and we need to comply. If everything goes right you won't notice a thing.

July 2018

Done in June

Ask a Question wizard: We release a sandboxed prototype for community feedback.

Left nav and site themes: Left nav, responsiveness and new themes are up and running on SO, MSO and MSE. We also have rolled out community driven enhancements and bug fixes including:

• Sticky left nav
• Hide left nav global pref

User satisfaction survey: First round of user satisfaction survey invites were sent to Teams users this month.

OpenID removal: Emails went out to impacted OpenID users. If you have any issues or concerns, the please contact us.

In progress

Ask a Question wizard: We will have an experiment running on SO by end of month.

Left nav and site themes: We will be posting the first 10 site designs for feedback early this month. Next step is to release those 10 designs including an update for all network sites with "stock" theme. Later in the month we will release an additional 10-20 designs for feedback.

Tag watching improvements: These will be live on SO, MSO, and MSE this month and will roll out to other network sites in conjunction with the new themes.

Custom question lists (aka replace "new nav"): Improved question list experience with filter and sort controls is set for a beta release this month. Ability to save custom question list will be coming later this summer.

Responsive design: We will finish up Ask a Question, improving mod tools on the question page and a variety of other features/pages.

OpenID removal: Onsite notices will go out to impacted users early this month. Final email will be sent on or around July 11th. OpenID support will be turned off on July 25th.

Starting in July

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Welcome Wagon (aka the inclusive project)

• Code of Conduct rollout: We've posted a draft version of a new CoC. After we've responded/incorporated the feedback, we will make sure that all users are aware of the new policy and incorporate it into our user sign up and on boarding.
• Comment flagging improvements: To align with the new CoC we will be making various changes in how comment flagging works.
  • Allowing new users to flag comments on their post
  • Updating flagging options to match CoC
  • Updating commenting UI to make flagging more discoverable
  • Provide better feedback on flag submission

June 2018

Done in May

Tag watching (aka favorite tags): These experience updates will ship to SO and the entire network in conjunction with the left nav and theming. I'll be posting more information with an overview of the changes later this week.

GDPR: TeamDAG helped out with several tasks for GDPR compliance. If you have no idea what GDPR is then I'm honestly jealous. Check out Brace yourselves: The GDPR is coming! for more info. We <3 the EU.

In progress

AaQ wizard: We have run some early usability session on this and are planning to release a sandboxed prototype for community feedback by mid-June. We hope to have an experiment running on SO by end of month.

Responsive design pt5: Releasing to MSE any day for user feedback and testing. Next is to finish up Ask a Question and a variety of other features/pages. Once we are deployed to MSE we will release new features as they are ready. Other sites will get responsiveness with the left nav and theming.

Left nav and site themes: Got the MSE theme ready and it will launch any day. Next objective is releasing left nav on SO/MSO by mid-June. Folllowed by releasing to network sites with "stock" theme and 5-10 other sites by the end of June.

Custom question lists (aka Custom favorite searches): Improved question list experience with filter and sort controls is underway and the new target for release is late June/early July. Ability to save custom question list will be coming later this summer.

User satisfaction survey: These were delayed and will start going out to Teams users in mid-June. We are planning to start running them for public SO users as well and will then extend to other Q&A sites.

OpenID deprecation: This work was delayed, but is on track for this month. We pushed out the deadline to August.

Starting in June

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Inclusive project: As a part of our work on making Q&A sites more welcoming and inclusive we are investigating a variety of work including enhancing comment flagging, better supporting users in their early interactions, upgrading our Be Nice policy into a formal code of conduct and many other ideas. We will be sharing more about these efforts in future meta and blog posts coming your way soon.

August 2018

Done in July

Welcome Wagon (aka the inclusive project)

• Final Code of Conduct: Rolled out across the network
• Comment flagging improvements: Deployed. Check out the details here

Left nav and site themes: Posted designs for first ~10 sites. Prepared to push designs live (this slipped into August). Worked on an additional ~20 site designs.

OpenID removal: All communications were sent to impacted users (email and onsite notification). We actively worked on removing support for Open ID but got hung up on SE.com and Area 51 where an old sign in/up flow is used.

Custom question lists (aka replace "new nav"): Released phase I question list experience with filter and sort controls. See details in this post.

Tag watching improvements: Rolled out to all network sites.

Improved mod tools: We released improvements to the embedded mod tools on the question pages.

In progress

Ask a Question wizard: We will have an experiment running on SO by early September (this was postponed from last month).

Left nav and site themes: Released designs on Apple, Super User, Server Fault, Math, TeX, Ask Ubuntu, Unix & Linux, and Code Golf (stock theme test). We are actively working on bugs and feedback from those sites. Continuing to design next ~20 sites and will release designs for feedback and push more sites live.

New contributor indicator is coming soon. Check out the details.

Custom question lists Working on ability to save custom question list and notification infrastructure. This work will continue into September for sure.

Responsive design: We will finish up Ask a Question and a variety of other features/pages.

OpenID removal: Finish removal.

Starting in August

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Network wide site satisfaction survey: We are planning to begin running a regular site satisfaction survey. This will build on the work we did for Teams and will cover SO, Jobs, Teams and network sites.

February 2018

Done

Newsletter infrastructure update: You may have noticed that control of your newsletter subscriptions have moved to your local profile from SE.com. (see newsletter settings image) This is a part of moving most SE.com functionality into the core code and enabling these same features for channels.

Improvements in sign up flow: We made a change to our sign up flow. The job status question is now required. The result is that everyone declares their interest (actively looking, open, not interested) and we don't bother folks who aren't interested in jobs.

Documentations rep freeze: The sun has completely set on documentation. Any rep you received is frozen which means we are removing documentation code including the code that calculated rep. Removing unused code is a good thing. We're doing a lot of that these days to make our lives easier. Move along now. Not much to see here.

Channels features: Most of you won't see these changes yet, but we rolled out a number of improvements for our Channels alpha users including improvements to help provide better context for when you're "in" a channel, mobile skin support for channels, ability to retarget a question to your private channel versus public Stack Overflow, and so much more.

In progress

Responsive design: We are actively implementing responsive design for question pages and question list pages. One of the first steps was to remove the tables from the comments on question pages. Comments are now list items. Sorry if the rapid changes break userscripts but it's for the better.

Tag subscriptions: Last month we wrapped up some architecture work for this feature, finished our UX specs and gathered feedback in some user research sessions. This month we will get it working for channels and hopefully test the changes on one of our public communities.

Response to top bar feedback pt 2: We are wrapping up the final top bar fix based on your feedback. Soon the Inbox, Achievements, Review queue and site switcher menus will progressively render so that people on slow connections have a better experience. (This work was postponed from last month)

Facebook auth updates: Facebook is updating their auth requirements and we need to comply. If everything goes right you won't notice a thing. (This work was postponed from last month)

Starting in February

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Question list improvements: We are doing work to unify the various question list views based on data from actual usage. This will provide a solid foundation for us to work from so that we can reintroduce some form of the functionality that used to be called New Nav.

User satisfaction survey: Understanding user satisfaction levels based on quarterly user satisfaction survey is an important data point for most sites. In the past we have relied exclusively on anecdotal feedback to evaluate satisfaction. This month we will be building an automated system to randomly select users and prompt them via email to fill out a survey. This system will be tested on channels alpha users and will be expanded to others over time.

Ask a Question template v2: Read about the results from our AaQ template v1 experiment. We are sketching and prototyping a few approaches inspired from community feedback and hope to start building a version 2 experiment to run later this month or early in March.

Channels features: TeamDAG continues to add a bunch of features for channels including improved themes, channel health dashboard, tag improvements and cleaning up a variety of features from public SO that aren't needed in channels.

March 2018

Done

Responsive design pt1: Implemented question pages and question list pages. One of the first steps was to remove the tables from the comments on question pages. Comments are now list items. Sorry if the rapid changes break userscripts but it's for the better.

Facebook auth updates: Facebook is updating their auth requirements and we need to comply. If you haven't noticed anything by now, we did it right.

Question list improvements: Finished work to unify the various question list views based on data from actual usage. This will provide a solid foundation for us to work from so that we can reintroduce some form of the functionality that used to be called New Nav. (NOTE: This work is done but not yet deployed to public SO. We will roll this out along with coming nav changes and Custom fav searches (see below))

Teams (aka Channels) features: Most of you won't see these changes yet, but we rolled out a number of improvements for our Teams alpha users including team themes (works on mobile skin too), top bar now shows your team rep when you're on a team page, improvements for question lists, and a bunch of clean up work so that features are appropriately contextualized for Teams.

In progress

Responsive design pt2: We are cleaning up the long tail of issues on question pages and question list pages. Next up are Ask a Question experience, tags, users, and search.

Tag subscriptions: Almost done with this work for Teams and will be extending the improvements to public SO. Release will be in April.

User satisfaction survey: Understanding user satisfaction levels based on quarterly user satisfaction survey is an important data point for most sites. In the past we have relied exclusively on anecdotal feedback to evaluate satisfaction. This month we will be building an automated system to randomly select users and prompt them via email to fill out a survey. This system will be tested on Teams alpha users and will be expanded to others over time.

Starting in March

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Custom favorite searches: We are in the design phase on this one. Goal is to reintroduce some form of the functionality that used to be called New Nav.

AaQ dupe finder: We are working on a prototype that redirects a question asker to look for existing question/answers first. We are working on rolling out the prototype in an experiment. This idea came out of the Ask a Question conversations earlier and replaces the "Ask a Question template v2" work for now, though we will come back to that experiment in the near future.

Teams features: TeamDAG continues to add a bunch of features for Teams including improved tag management, activity indicator, Teams product page, improved Teams emails.

Postponed

Response to top bar feedback pt 2: We will pick this work back up after Teams is out the door. To Do: Inbox, Achievements, Review queue and site switcher menus will progressively render so that people on slow connections have a better experience.

Ask a Question template v2: Read about the results from our AaQ template v1 experiment. We are sketching and prototyping a few approaches inspired from community feedback and hope to start building a version 2 experiment to run later.

April 2018

Done in March

Responsive design pt2: Speced out the changes for Ask a Question experience. Implemented search, tags and users pages. Also, worked out how what adjustments need to be made to support ads with our responsive design.

OpenID deprecation: Announced the deprecation plan. Removed the ability to create new accounts with external OpenID providers (Yahoo, AOL, Blogger, Live Journal and Steam). Added the ability for existing users to add email/pw login option for their current account. Fleshed out the rest of the plan through July end of support date.

Teams features: We rolled out a number of improvements for our Teams alpha users including improvements for tags, emails, new question notification, and team newsletter prefs.

Quack Overflow: April Fools has come and gone, but Quack Overflow will live on in our hearts and this Rubber Ducking Wikipedia page (thanks for whoever did that!).

Top bar for Enterprise customers: Moved the SO top bar to Stack Overflow for Enterprise.

Sponsorship pilot: DAG provided support for the sponsorship pilot that was announced last month.

In progress

Responsive design pt3: Implementing Ask a Question page and support for ads. Fixing lots of bugs. Target is to release to Teams users.

Tag subscriptions: We are almost done with this work for Teams, really. Should launch to team's users real soon now. This month we will begin making sure it will scale to SO.com.

Custom question lists (aka Custom favorite searches): Finished spec and designs for adding support for filter and sort controls to all question lists and the ability to save custom question list views. Ran user testing on the designs. All clear to start implementation. Goal is to reintroduce some form of the functionality that used to be called New Nav.

User satisfaction survey: Understanding user satisfaction levels based on quarterly user satisfaction survey is an important data point for most sites. In the past we have relied exclusively on anecdotal feedback to evaluate satisfaction. This month we will be building an automated system to randomly select users and prompt them via email to fill out a survey. This system will be tested on Teams alpha users and will be expanded to others over time.

Starting in April

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Network site themes: As mentioned in the ch-ch-ch-changes post we are simplifying our themes. Goal for this month is to get the infrastructure plugged in, design themes for 10+ of our most highly themed/highly traffic sites, gather feedback from those communities and lock down the roll out plan for the May/June.

Teams features: TeamDAG continues to add a bunch of features for Teams including Left nav improvements, inline mentions, testing automation, a ton of clean up items and Teams product page/launch support.

AaQ dupe finder/question wizard: We made limited progress on this front, but things are picking up steam and we are planning to have a prototype ready for community feedback this month.

May 2018

Done in April

Responsive design pt3: After a ton of work and testing, this is rolling out to Teams users (see post with details).

Tag watching (aka favorite tags): This shipped for Teams with a new name and new user experience. Coming soon to SO and the network.

Tag Divergence is a funky "little" feature that Teams users will see. When asking a question on Teams you can reuse tags used on public Stack Overflow and you can also create tags that are unique to your team. Tag divergence (don't love that name) makes sure you know which is which.

Teams product pages: TeamDAG built the beautiful pages you see for Teams, Enterprise, and Pricing. It was so much harder than it looks and involved a cast of thousands (well, not thousands but you know…). Lots of user research went into building effective pages. And, they're responsive!

Teams core Q&A cleanup: There were lots of little tweaks that we made to the system to make Teams work. Lesson learned, our Q&A system is complex.

In progress

Responsive design pt4: We are continuing work on responsive with a goal to release to MSE for user feedback and testing this month.

Network site themes: We are a bit behind on this one, but are still moving forward. Later this month a new theme will be deployed to MSE (along with responsive and the left nav). While we gather feedback from the community, we will start working on site themes for a small group of the network sites.

AaQ wizard: This project has moved to the front burner as a part of the inclusive project (see below) and we are planning to have a prototype ready for community feedback this month with a release as an experiment in June.

Tag watching: Working on scaling out our Teams changes to SO and the entire network. You likely won't see this until June or July.

Custom question lists (aka Custom favorite searches): Finished early user research for some of the core concepts. Improved question list experience with filter and sort controls is targeted for this month. Ability to save custom question list will be coming later this summer.

User satisfaction survey: These will start going out to Teams' users mid-May.

OpenID deprecation: Emails will go out to anyone who is impacted later this month. Shortly after this goes out those same users will see a banner on the site notifying them of the same.

Starting in May

Each of the items below describes some work that is planned for the coming month. As needed, we will directly engage the community to help shape the work.

Inclusive project: TeamDAG will be working with folks from our research, design, data science, and community teams as we begin to idenitfy the next steps to address friendliness and inclusiveness on Stack Overflow and across the network. See the blog post for an overview of this project.