Create a guided tour for new users

Question

New users of a Stack Exchange site may not fully understand how the site works. For example, the user may not know how to vote, what reputation is, how to format a question or answer, or how to navigate the site. While the FAQ and privilege pages may offer enough information to teach new users some of the basics of Stack Exchange, they aren't the most coherent or beginner-friendly way to teach how the site works.

To help new users learn the ropes, I suggest a guided tour for users creating an account for the first time on a Stack Exchange site. The tour should consist of a series of pages that (suggestions welcome):

• welcomes the user to the site
• explain how to post (and edit) a question, answer, or comment
• specify the scope of the site, what questions are on or off topic, and other questions to avoid asking (such as those that are highly subjective)
• provide examples of good and bad questions and answers
• show how to vote on posts and accept answers
• explain the reputation and badge systems
• show how to navigate the site; how to search for questions using the search box, tags, etc.; and how to find users
• show users how to read user profiles
• explain what meta is and how to use it
• introduce chat and explain how to use it
• introduce users to the Stack Exchange network as a whole, and how the site forms part of the SE network (including a brief introduction to Area 51 and the new site proposal process)
• discuss more advanced features such as flagging a post, voting to close, community wiki, etc.

By creating a guided tour for new users, we can help keep users interested in Stack Exchange and make the site easier for novices to use. There should be a bronze badge for completing the tour. Personally, I'd like to have the tour give the impression that users are embarking on an exciting journey by posting their first question or answer.

We can use the suggestions on RFC - Stack Exchange 2-minute intro as a start, but I'd prefer an interactive page-by-page introduction on the sites themselves, where users can learn by doing, rather than by watching a video.

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Edit: As an extension of this feature request, we may want to consider taking the approach Dropbox takes: create a series of "quests" for the user to take, each involving a key function of the system (which includes completing the guided tour). Once the user completes a certain number of these quests, award a reputation bonus (perhaps 50) to the user. These quests should include (suggestions welcome):

• complete the guided tour
• ask a question, earning at least one upvote
• answer a question, earning at least one upvote
• accept an answer
• share a link to a question or answer, visited by at least 25 unique IP addresses
• flag a post (marked helpful)
• participate in meta
• participate in chat
• associate an account on one site with accounts on other Stack Exchange sites

Here's how Dropbox does it:

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Assuming we don't implement the "quests" above, we can nonetheless give users a reputation incentive (perhaps 10 or 15 points) on top of the badge for completing the guided tour. That way, we can encourage users to read about how the site works, helping new users write better posts and take better advantage of what Stack Exchange has to offer.

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One of the key reasons to have a guided tour is to have all the important information on how to use Stack Exchange in one place, rather than scattered across places like the FAQ, the privileges pages, the meta site, and the blog. The way the rules are presently laid out on Stack Exchange can make it hard for beginners to fully understand the rules. A guided tour can make these rules and guidelines more cohesively arranged, which can greatly help users who need help finding a certain rule or guideline that they may have missed. The tour doesn't need to thoroughly explain every rule, but it should briefly mention most of the key points about using Stack Exchange; the tour text should contain links to full discussions of rules.

Answer 1

First off: I like parts of your idea, though possibly not for the reasons you'd hope. More on this later, but... keep it in mind.

While the FAQ and privilege pages may offer enough information to teach new users some of the basics of Stack Exchange, they aren't the most coherent or beginner-friendly way to teach how the site works.

New users - the vast, vast majority of them - won't read the FAQ, or the privilege pages, or notification banners or even all of the instructions on the login screen.

And that's ok. It doesn't mean they're stupid, or lazy, or hate us. They're here because a Google search turned up an answer to their question, or answers to their last three dozen questions, and now that they have a question we don't have an answer for we're stuck in their head as a good place to look for one anyway.

Most importantly: they're not here to get reputation, or badges, or become part of a community. They're here for answers to their questions. Anything we throw in their way - from a line of text to a multi-page document - is just a roadblock they have to navigate around in order to get to their destination.

With me so far? Good.

Harnessing desire for the benefit of all

Now, a new user to Dropbox wants storage space. Quite possibly they want storage space they can get stuff into easily, from where ever that stuff happens to currently reside, and retrieve from some other location. Those are the users Dropbox wants at least. So the quests exist to make sure they've set that up properly before they get a ton of storage space to play around with. Note that each quest they must complete is something they'd probably have to do anyway - making sure they do it up-front just saves everyone time and frustration later, after they've spent 2 hours uploading that video of the kids eating watermelon on Independence Day and now need to figure out how to pull it down on the desktop where they can edit it and re-upload it for the grandfolks.

At no point in the process - and this is critical to understanding why it works - does Dropbox ask them to spend a few hours hanging out in the Dropbox Townhall where they can discuss matters of Dropbox governance and perhaps help a few other Dropbox users learn to use Dropbox. There's no gratuitous "learning about the Dropbox community" here - everything a new user does is self-serving, and they're rewarded for doing things that benefit them by being given more things that benefit them.

So what's the equivalent new user checklist on Stack Exchange?

You're 1 step away from a helpful answer!
The one quest below will teach you how to get the most out of your Stack Exchange. Finish at least one of them, and we'll give you a reward!

1. Ask a clear, useful question

That's it.

No really, that's it. For most of the new users on Stack Exchange, all of this other stuff is just... Meaningless. We go well out of our way to give it some meaning with these token economies of badges and "reputation", but boil it down to its fundamental essence and the primary motivation for folks asking questions, the single best reward we can offer them for doing a good job with it, is... a good answer.

And that's also the best thing most of them can do for us. All this other "stuff" - badges, reputation, comments, voting, meta, chat, unicorns, waffles... It serves a purpose, and if they complete that one key quest they'll get plenty of them... But it's infrastructure, overhead - the core value of these sites is utterly, ridiculously simple:

• Useful answers to common questions.

Indeed, I'd be really embarrassed about writing 11 paragraphs to get to that end, if this question didn't already have three answers, with only Andomar's even coming close to the truth on this and hardly even a kind word for his efforts.

So, here we are at last. I'm sorry, but there's no way in hell this sort of byzantine introduction will ever accomplish your goal of a "coherent, beginner-friendly way to teach [people] how the site works." It doesn't match their goals, it doesn't make them do things they'd want or have to do anyway, and it doesn't necessarily even benefit us - really, the last thing I want new users to get is an "introduction to chat". Rewarding them with reputation would just be insulting to them and harmful to us - they'll get plenty of rep if they post a useful question, and if they can't or won't do that all we would have accomplished would be making 10-50 points the new 1.

But I said I liked parts of your idea, so let's get to that...

Those infuriating nerds who actually do read the manual

Ah, remember being a kid? Opening a gift, to find some game or gadget you'd been lusting after, tearing open the wrapper, dumping the pieces out on the table, and diving in to see how they worked?

Yeah, me neither. Since you're actually proposing this idea, I'm guessing you were more like me, and that new toy sat, lonely and ignored, while you eagerly paged through the manual, absorbing every usage instruction, troubleshooting tip, obvious warning about not using it while plugged in and showering, and which screws would absolutely void your warranty if removed. And then you went and removed those screws, just in case there was something really cool inside. And then you went and wrote up a better manual, with all the details they left out of the main one.

Most people don't do this. Even if they wanted to, they don't have time.

But... That tiny minority who does, the ones who take the time to fully understand the system they're using - perhaps before really even using it - and then take the additional time to find all the undocumented bits that no one talks about and even the designers don't know or let onto knowing... And then publish that...

That minority is critical to keeping these sites running. When a new site launches, it's really useful to have one of them active on it. When one of the normal users gets into trouble, they're there to explain how things work, and why they work that way, and how to make them work. Having the right person with the right information in the right place at the right time is vastly more useful than a tour no one pays attention to.

And right now, the best resource they have is The Community FAQ here on Meta. Which has been maintained and expanded for years now, and is a fantastic resource, but could use a bit of re-organization, because it's not a terribly cohesive or even coherent document.

So I'm going to recommend that you, instead of focusing on some sort of "Stack Exchange for Dummies" tour, look at ways in which all of that detailed information could be presented more effectively to that handful of users for whom reading it is actually their goal.

Answer 2

A good idea, but a few issues:

• Does a one-and-done beginner who just needs a certain Python question answered need to learn extra stuff?
• How is this implemented?
• What exactly is implemented?

I'm assuming you are thinking JavaScript/Web 2.0 stuff with interaction.

What about if a few Good Samaritans made a thorough YouTube video with all that you're requesting? For example, to:

show how to navigate the site; how to search for questions using the search box, tags, etc.; and how to find users

Well a YouTube video works fine. After all, Eclipse and Netbeans IDE vids are very well-received. And the FAQ will reference that.

Again, it's a great idea - it's just that to do it well is a fairly big amount of work, and most newbies usually skip that kind of thing.

Answer 3

New SO users arrive with a problem that they are stuck at. They want to ask a question; their minds are busy, and there is little room for distraction. So unless you limit distraction to a minimum, people with real questions CANNOT ask them on SO.

I just tested, and if you hit Ask Question as a new user, you

• Get hit by a wall of text
• Have to check a checkbox
• Click the next button
• After that you are told you have to create an account (wtf?)
• An incomprehensible OpenID screen pops up

You probably lost 90% of the interesting questions right there. I probably wouldn't have joined myself if SO had made me go through that crap three years ago.

Adding yet another hurdle like a tour or a quest would make this problem even worse. Programmers want to solve problems, not take a guided tour in what management thinks would be the ideal Stack Overflow citizen.

Answer 4

Extensive changes have been introduced to make Stack Exchange easier to understand for new users, including the new about and help pages as well as an overhauled close system. Given these changes, the underlying problem has been resolved.

In particular, the new about page does an excellent job of guiding new users on how to use Stack Exchange, what questions are on topic for a particular site, and what questions should not be asked. This page comes remarkably close to the "guided tour" I had originally envisioned. I am very happy to see these changes, since veterans and newcomers alike can now make the most of the Stack Exchange network.