Gamification @ Stack Exchange

Now, that we know about Stack Exchange and Area 51, lets skip to the main part. The Gamification Site Proposal finally went into the commitment phase. It has been moving along slowly, but if speed is any indicator, then slow is better than fast.

The topic of the proposal is gamification. Gamification is a buzzword which means the use of game elements in non-game engagement contexts. The term, however inaccurate and incomplete, will stick, as most of the work being done, and there is a lot being done, on the field already references and uses the name. Gamification has spread like wildfire over the past few years and will continue on an upward trend till 2016 after which things are expected to slow down. There are a huge number of designers who develop gamified applications and a significant number of people who are treading into it for the first time. The gamification course on Coursera has had a total of 19000 individuals complete it with greater than 70% marks. Add to that the number of professionals already working on gamified systems, and you get a significant number of internet using gamifiers.

What is missing from here, is a single collaborative knowledge sharing resource where developers may collaborate with researchers and work on their problems. A place where professionals may interact and discuss the principals of the field. What is missing is one Q&A site that deals with all of the issues of these diverse user groups. Herein comes gamification.stackexchange.com.

The creator of the proposal is himself a professional of the field, Ryan Elkins. This shows that there is a space to be filled. Also, the 10k Courserians that complete the course everywhere have nowhere to go and discuss once the course gets over (the course forums are cleared every session). Gamification.SE can be a home to many of them as well.

All in all, the user-base is real and vast, and there is no major competition nearby. Excellent conditions for the site to come out strong.

Coming to the scope, the site would cover the psychology that is involved in gamification, along with design and user experience. All of these is technically on-topic on other sites, but at less than 4-5 questions on gamification per month, it is safe to say, that none of the sites would have a problem.

So, what are you waiting for? Register your support!

Area 51 is Broken

Recently, the Arduino site proposal was hit by a serial downvoter. On my last count, every question had received at least one downvote so thats about 50 downvotes spread across two pages (Someone really considers this as a bad proposal idea). I thought this was wrong (how could it not be?) and the issue was brought to the attention of the Community Team. However, what happened next, really surprised me. One of the Community Managers looked into it, and responded with :

 I looked at the actual voting data on the example questions and there is one person who cast a large number of downvotes. It looks like there's a user who doesn't think the proposal should go through or that the proposed questions belong to it, which is entirely fair. This is exactly what Area 51 is for.

The one thing that stood out here was that, downvoting all the questions on a proposal page is an acceptable way to not-support or block a proposal. What I find even weirder is the fact that this is the only way to block a proposal (not considering duplicate proposals, in which case there are other ways). So, I believe that Area 51 is broken. What do I mean by broken ? Have a look.



I dont agree with a lot of the stuff said in the video, but I do agree with the main point.

If I think its broken, its broken.

Dont worry, thats not going to be my only argument in this post.

Stack Exchange is a service and earns its money off user data and user actions on the site. So, having a good interface is pretty much one of the basics. Just to be clear, the overall Stack Exchange user interface is really good and functional, it is just Area 51 that seems to belong to a different age and time.

It is only here that the functionality and usability dont match which goes against a simple UI design principle :

The principle of context -- Limit user activity to one well-defined context unless there's a good reason not to

What this principle states is that an action should have a single function and should work in a single context. As an example, lets look at the Back button on your browser. Its action while in the middle of a browsing session is to simply take you a logical step back, that is, one web page back. What happens if you are on your first page ? There are two possibilities here, either it could simply not function and provide a message saying that you are on your first page or it could limit the action to the specific context and close your browser window. Now, lets see what actually happens in real browsers. When you open up Chrome (or Chromium), and are on your home page, you see this :

Freehand Circles. Sigh.

The back and forward buttons are grey-ed out. You cannot actually quit by clicking on the back button. Here, the action is preserved to a single context. I believe this to be a better design methodology considering that you will be catering to users having varied expertise levels in using computers. Of course, this rule has a conditional attached to it. However, coming back to the Area 51 user interface, I really see no good reason for the downvote action to be used in different contexts. The UI itself is far from being cluttered. Its more minimalistic than what is present on other sites.

This actual usage goes against another design principle :

The principle of shortcuts-- Provide both concrete and abstract ways of getting a task done

The principle here is that there should be both long and short ways of doing a task. As users become more experienced with an application, they tend to migrate from the longer method to the shorter method. This principle, also implies, that the user interface should make common actions accomplish-able in the minimum number of steps.

Lets go back to Area 51 now. When a user sees a proposal idea, the two possible reactions are either that the user likes the proposal idea or does not like the proposal idea (internet browsing individuals are opinionated). If a user likes a proposal idea, then the most basic action that a user can do is to support it, by clicking on the Follow It! button.

However, if a user wants to do the alternative, then there is no visible option. I see how this protects proposal ideas from getting bombed by malicious users, but what it misses is a large part of the dont like opinion.

Now, the proposal has a lot of example questions underneath. If you think that a question is a good fit for a site, then you can upvote it. If you dont think it is a good question for the site, then you can downvote it.

Upvote Tooltip

Downvote Tooltip

This feedback is directly sent to the question poser, who had put in time to think about how to develop the proposal and what it should include. Simple. Users who are interested in the proposal can use these options to improve the proposal and provide constructive inputs, as is suggested by the tooltips. However, there still is the other faction of users who think that the basis of the proposal itself is wrong, and have had no chance to express disagreement. Now, things get complicated.

Some of the users, who feel that the proposal is a really bad idea, realise that they still can express disagreement by downvoting the questions. Now, a downvote, as I mentioned, is equivalent to negative feedback on the question. It is not for

I'd rather not see this proposed site

(However, I was told that this is just a semantic difference, something that I do not agree with)

It is for feedback on the question, not on the context of the question and there is no way for the question poser to know the context of the feedback. So, this faction is able to implicitly thwart the proposal, by explicitly telling off users on their constructive inputs. The more motivated ones, like the one who caused this whole discussion, may go trigger happy and downvote all of the questions.

So, how can this be avoided ? How can agreement and disagreement both be expressed ?
My take. Coming up soon!

Why am I promoting Arduino at Stack Exchange ?

This is a chat message that I wrote in response to a comment asking me :

 why are you keen on promoting Arduino.SE ?

(In case you were wondering, all this was happening on Area 51)

I started out writing something that turned into a rather long explanation, and I believe is worthy of a blog post. So, here it is :

A combination of reasons. In the few months that I have been on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, I have interacted with some amazing individuals right from engineers at Googleplex, California to researchers in UK. I have helped some university students through really awesome project work, some of which I followed up outside of the platform of SE as well. I have answered a few questions and asked some as well and have got excellent responses. Moreover, the different Se sites that exist have made me enjoy this experience even more.

The SE platform is one that the more I use, the more I discover and the more I believe in. I think it has some excellent tried and tested features which make it an excellent platform for technical discourse and learning(to an extent). Look at the toolkit at User Interface as an example. I dont see why we should not provide such tools to different communities and specifically the Arduino Community.

Also, SE inadvertly extends to social interactions as well, which further strengthens the community. There is direct interaction with employees, there is a very responsive Meta.SO community as well. I do think there is scope for a slight bit of an increase in the social aspect of the platform, but thats for another discussion.

Coming to Arduino itself, I started using the platform a year back and have enjoyed using it. I have done a few projects and done some stuff that I probably would not have done if not for the abstraction that the platform offers. The Arduino forums do exist but in the time I have spent there, I have realised that a forum just does not scale up and or work as well as SE when it comes to resouce generation and sharing. There are a lot of questions there for which detailed answers exist but they are extremely hard to find. So, instead you get some quick short answers, but you miss out on that one great answer. Moreover, there usually isn't any closing thread feature as well which is immensely irritating. All this knowledge and expertise, would be much better served on this platform rather the 3-4 major Arduino forums that exist. I am overly optimistic when I think about bringing individuals from dfferent platforms together but I do believe its worth trying.

As far as why not EE goes, I just do not believe that they are serving this community as well as possible.

Knowledge is valuable, but only if it is there for people to find, and in short, this is one of the best ways to share it. I want to contribute to both, SE and Arduino, in more ways than I can just now and this is one way that I can. I will continue to push this forward till it does become a site.

What is Area 51 ?

I stumbled across Area 51 while wandering through the Stack Exchange network. 

Look at the spaceship

The FAQ states:

Area 51 is the Stack Exchange Network staging zone. It's where groups of experts come together to build new Q&A sites that work just like Stack Overflow. Here you can:

• Propose new Q&A sites. If you have an idea for an expert Q&A site, propose it here.

• Get involved in the process. Help sites get off the ground by defining the types of questions that are wanted, recruiting a critical mass of experts, and committing to the site's success.

This is where users can propose new site ideas which are called New Site Proposals in SE lingo. These sites need to go through three phases before they get launched as official sites under the Stack Exchange network. The phases are :

• Definition Phase : This is first phase and the phase where most proposals get weeded out. In this phase, users are expected to :

• Click the "Follow It!" link, if interested in a proposed site.

• Post questions that you would want to see on the actual site, when launched.

• Upvote questions if you think they'll be interesting and are relevant to the proposal, downvote questions if you think they are not. 

• Comment on questions already proposed to seek clarifications about the question and discuss it.

• Commitment Phase : In this phase, the defined site requires individuals to commit to using it. Users can commit to the site by filling in their name and level of experience in the proposal domain. A commitment can be easily fulfilled, its just 3-4 questions and answers.

• Beta Phase : If a proposal reaches here, then the supporters have done an excellent job so far (will explain later). This phase is extremely critical for the future of the site. It has two very different phases within it.
• Private Beta : Users who committed to using the site are initially invited to participate in and simultaneously test the site and its features. This also acts as the seeding phase of the site before it opens up to the World Wide Web. The users have an extremely critical task at hand as whatever content is created now decides, at the very least, the site's direction for the short term future.
• Public Beta : Now, the site opens! It is fully functional and requires a lot of publicizing and content to truly take it towards success. Once the site satisfies certain criteria and reaches the tipping point, the site gets launched as a Stack Exchange Network site.

This was a summarized description of the site creation process. It should be enough to get you started on the platform.


Certain parts have been copied AS IS from the Area 51 site FAQ. These parts have been indented and are in a different font to be easily identifiable.