Upcoming sign-up experiments related to tags

Question

Update August 29, 2024

We launched the recent tags experiment on Stack Overflow. A bug is currently causing it to show up network-wide. We are working to correct that, but if you find yourself enjoying it while it's available network-wide, do let us know.

Update August 22nd, 2024

As discussed in the section referring to experiment three, we have released the simplified tag page header to Stack Overflow. We will revisit whether to release this change network-wide in the future.

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In April, we shared that we had been conducting sign-up experiments on Stack Overflow and found positive results. These were centered around simplifying the typical sign-up flow and experience. Our team is continuing to explore ways to improve the experience for new users on the platform, and we are now exploring iterating on the tags experience for new and registered users.

Why focus on tags?

Tags provide a way to filter and help users focus on their interests and help make it easier to find answers to their questions. One of the recent sign-up experiments centered around watching tags showed a promising increase in account creation. This encouraging result has motivated us to conduct additional lightweight experiments to raise awareness of tags and also make signing up on these pages easier.

Our hypothesis is that simplifying the current sign-up experience from the tags page will provide value for anonymous users. We'll measure the initial experiments by evaluating whether users are more likely to sign up in order to watch a tag. If we see that more users are watching tags, we'll consider continuing to improve the tags experience. We also have a few changes for registered users outlined here to see how it impacts their behavior as well.

Tag Experiments

We will be operating the following experiments on the tag page for Stack Overflow. Depending on how that goes, we will have a conversation about expanding them to the rest of the network.

Experiment 1: Understanding the reason users “Ignore tags”

We have a significant number of anonymous users who are clicking the ignore button on hover for questions. However, this action does nothing for that page, so we want to better understand why they are using it. So, we have this temporary prompt coming up for unregistered users who click the button to ask them their reasoning for selecting this option. Depending on what we learn here, we might make some changes.

Experiment 2: Updating the tag hover

We will be running an A/B/C test when users hover over tags. We intend to test whether simplifying the hover and making the call-to-action more evident will encourage more users to watch tags.

There will be three variants that both anonymous and registered users will see:

As you may notice, variants B and C show slightly shorter tag descriptions. For the purposes of this experiment, we’ll be grabbing the first line from the full tag wiki and using it in this context, but should the experiment prove successful, we’ll need to think of a better long-term solution. In the context of tagging questions (either when asking a question, or editing it), the current excerpt, along with the usage guidance present in it, will still be used even during the experiment.

Additionally, you’ll notice that we are testing copy changes with the call to action with “Watch tag” and “Follow tag.”

Experiment 3: Recent Tags entry point

On the left side of the navigation toolbar, both registered and unregistered users will see a “RECENT TAGS” section, showing tags they have looked at during their sessions. Clicking on those tags will work just like clicking a tag anywhere else on the site.

We will also be simplifying the tagged questions page for both registered and anonymous users as part of this experiment:

Anonymous Users:

Registered Users:

For registered users, all the links that were on the tagged questions page will be accessible from the tag wiki page.

Experiment 4: Tags on Homepage

Unregistered users will be prompted with a modal to set up their homepage based on a set of suggested tags. When they have made their selection, they will be prompted to sign up and create an account. This modal comes up when they click the “Home” tab. Our plan is to create a proper personalized homepage experience for all users. When we get closer to starting that project you can expect more communication on that to provide feedback on what you think would be useful to see on that page.

We plan to do A/B tests on unregistered users for this test later this month to see which of these options encourages more watched tags and evaluate whether this is something that newer users are interested in. Please consider that these are only experiments, if we see positive signs that encourage us to make other changes, we will bring those to you for feedback – especially if they affect the registered user experience. If you have any suggestions or feedback regarding this, please let us know in an answer below.

Depending on how these experiments go, we may decide to improve the tag feature further. If you have any feedback on the experiments or have ideas on how to improve the tag experience for newer users, let us know.

We will be keeping an eye on this post for feedback till June 26th, 2024.

Answer 1

Our team is continuing to explore ways to improve the experience for new users on the platform,

What's your goal: maximising the number of new user accounts? Stack Exchange's design needs to serve the needs of several, quite different groups, and it seems like everything you're proposing these days is geared around this same target: "the experience for new users". I'm not convinced this is sensible.

You have identified some problems:

• We have a significant number of anonymous users who are clicking the ignore button on hover for questions.

• For the purposes of this experiment, we’ll be grabbing the first line from the full tag wiki and using it in this context, but should the experiment prove successful, we’ll need to think of a better long-term solution.

Well done for identifying these: I hadn't thought about this! Maybe a solution to the tag wiki excerpt problem could look like the close notice system… but I'm not thrilled about any of the proposals in this experiment.

We plan to do A/B tests on unregistered users for this test later this month to see which of these options encourages more watched tags

I know an even better way to encourage more watched tags: make the watched tags button automatically follow the mouse, and remove the "unwatch tag" button! That is to say: this is an absurd thing to optimise for. What are you actually trying to achieve? Let's start there, then we can work out how you can get there. Don't just immediately try to A/B test on the first proxy metric you find.

Hiding the RSS feeds will probably increase the use of the Watch feature, but RSS feeds will keep people returning to Stack Exchange (whereas the Watch feature only helps while you're on the site). If anything, you should be pushing RSS!

For registered users, all the links that were on the tagged questions page will be accessible from the tag wiki page.

Please don't login-wall functionality. That's the first step towards needing a hyphen. (And it will interfere with my workflow, which I doubt you'd have any way of knowing if I didn't say.)

If you have any feedback on the experiments or have ideas on how to improve the tag experience for newer users, let us know.

• Revisit the tag-hierarchy family of proposals. (See also: Wouldn't tag inheritance make sense?.)
• Tooling around version-tags. (See also: What is the use of version tags?)
  • Can we bring the <!-​- version --> syntax to Stack Overflow?
  • Version labels for answers

Those things people have been asking for for years, but have always been rejected because the devs couldn't immediately see how to do it? The designers could be really good at figuring out how to do that! Give them something worthwhile to do, rather than the incremental A/B-powered destruction that every large tech company seems to love.

Answer 2

October 30th:

So... this went live today, and opens a pop up any time a not logged in user clicks the home link in the left menu. It allows you to choose watched tags, lets you choose dark mode vs light mode (but not other accessibility modes,) then prompts you to login after a fake loading bar. It doesn't allow you to change other settings of the site, like the behavior of the left menu or your email preferences. This feature, with additional preferences added to it, would be a good feature for logged in users, but it shouldn't be usable without first logging in and shouldn't be attached to the home link.

Allowing users to go through the process of customizing their experience and then adding the login at the end is very manipulative. They should be prompted to login up front.

BTW... since there's nowhere else to post bug reports about this because it wasn't really announced... the tag search is bad. It should not be case sensitive.

Also... with this dialog, you have no option but to fill it out or close it and stay on the current page. the home link is entirely consumed by this button and there's no way to the home page around it... other than clicking the site logo which only works on MSO and SO, not the rest of the network sites because those go to stack exchange for some bizarre reason.

Original Answer:

For experiment 4, it seems like you're effectively planning to have a user go through the whole process of personalizing the home page, then prevent any of their choices from mattering unless they create an account. Isn't this a bit manipulative?

It's similar to how there's voting buttons for not logged in users, but in this case you'd be having them do far more than just click a button.

That said... does this mean we're getting the old unregistered home page back on stackoverflow.com? Or will this only be a thing on other stacks.

Answer 3

Maybe it's just me, but if I clicked "Ignore tag" and was asked why I clicked that, I would just dismiss the annoying dialog and assume the design was made by an idiot. Duh, if there is an "ignore tag" entry, I expect it to somehow allow me to ignore that tag. As in, probably don't display questions from this tag after the next refresh.

(Idle speculation: maybe there is a cookie or something it can save to keep this preference active on the browser side without requiring me to sign up?)

A menu item which doesn't do what I want is annoying on its own, and asking me what I thought it would do seems like a really bad practical joke.

In terms of practical actions, either hide the option for anonymous visitors if it doesn't do anything useful, or implement it so that it does.

Answer 4

Kevin's answer made me realize a thing.

Unregistered users will be prompted with a modal to set up their homepage based on a set of suggested tags. When they have made their selection, they will be prompted to sign up and create an account. This modal comes up when they click the “Home” tab.

Would this modal go ON TOP of Doofenshmirtz's "Google Login-Inator" that is being shown on each new site an user navigate to? Do we now have to expect that users will get TWO prompts asking them to "Pwetty Pwease, j...just create an account, you baka!"??

I really hope that this is just a misunderstanding and I am missing part of the picture but... hopefully you folks at the company also realize that users already didn't like ONE prompt being pushed in their face and even committed to block it like it was another bad ads. Showing another one after they already dismissed the first one... may not be a good idea.

Answer 5

Regarding Experiment 2: Updating the tag hover,

1. For B and C, please, please consider adding back the "Ignore tag" button, even if the width may be reduced to lower its prominence. It's a convenient way to ignore tags when seen.
2. For B and C, I noticed the capitalization of the first letter, e.g. "Javascript". Is this done automatically, or taken from somewhere else? Might be careful with some quirk like Ios.
3. For B and C, if the text is grabbed from the first line of the full tag wiki, what about those tags that don't have their wiki, or the first line is not optimal to be shown as a description? (Meanwhile, perhaps this might be a good nudge to give some more love to tag wiki)
4. Regarding the "Watch" vs "Follow", this may be interesting because currently we have different wording for similar features, "Watched tags" and "Followed posts".

Answer 6

Regarding experiment #3, how are anonymous users supposed to sort tag questions by score/age/etc?

I'm guessing the URL can be edited to point to /tagged/?tab=frequent, but that's not very ergonomic for people who know SE, but frequently browse it while not logged (I certainly do, notably at work). Or people who are just curious.

Answer 7

For the purposes of this experiment, we’ll be grabbing the first line from the full tag wiki and using it in this context

Why are you doing this in the first place? I can think of no reason why you would want to show a random amount of text from the full description in place of the excerpt. The tag wiki excerpt is specifically designed to be shown in places like this modal and has specific rules on what its content must contain for that express reason.

The full description body does not. This experiment has led to bugs like this: New tag watch redesign uses the full wiki (without formatting) in the modal instead of using the tag wiki excerpt

Answer 8

There may be some factors here that you haven't considered yet (or some potentially-invalid assumptions about the user's knowledge that you don't realize you're making).

All three variants of your popup are lacking the same basic thing: an explanation of what the "watch/follow" and "ignore" buttons actually do. These are not standard terms and mean very different things on different websites. Does watching a tag mean that search results featuring that tag will get highlighted? Or that I'm signing myself up for a deluge of emails every time someone thinks about that tag? A new user won't have any idea what that button does. There are far too many scummy sites out there that like to bombard you with "updates" and "notifications", so people's instinct is not to click buttons like that unless you're really sure what they do. None of your proposed UI changes help the user understand what happens when they click that button. Trying to increase the number of users that click on a mystery button sounds like a futile exercise.

Along a similar vein, it's not clear what the "ignore" button does either. The site's help documents its function, but a new user wouldn't have that information at the point where the UI in question is shown. It's another "mystery button".

Taking a step farther back, how are users supposed to know what a "tag" even is? A quick perusal through various UI screens on the site yields zero instances where those little colored blocks with a word in them are explicitly labeled "tags". Even your help article about tags neglects to show what a tag actually looks like. It would not be unreasonable for a new user - particularly one whose native language is not English - to think that "tag" refers to the little popup window, and that the button with the circle-slash icon is a "close" button for the popup. That could be the reason you see so many clicks on that button.

These aren't terribly difficult problems to solve, but none of your three options addresses them. I'll propose an option 'D'. I have no art skills so the best I can do is a description:

• Give the tag description popup an explicit, obvious 'close' button
• Reword the watch/follow button to something like "Follow questions tagged '<%TAGNAME%>'"
• Reword the ignore button to something like "Ignore questions tagged '<%TAGNAME%>'"
• Change the "ignore" icon to something that can't be mis-interpreted to mean cancel or close, or remove the icon completely
• Instead of only having the "View Tag" link, have two separate links: "About Tags" and "About This Tag" or "Browse Tag". The former would lead to a help page with a beginner's overview of tags and this popup UI (a combination of the existing "What are tags" and "How do I use tags" pages), and the latter would link to the same "list of questions tagged 'X'" page as the current link.
• Consider adding a tooltip to the follow and ignore buttons that explains what they do

The tradeoff between providing enough info for new users and being annoyingly verbose for established users is a careful dance. You may be better off having a "default" version of the site that shows a UI geared towards new/anonymous users, and give logged-in users an option to enable a more streamlined "expert" mode if desired.

Based on the information in your help pages, the functionality of the follow and ignore buttons primarily influences the results shown when searching on the site. I don't think either of these gives much real value to anonymous users since - lets be honest - the overwhelming majority of them come here through search engines and not by searching directly on the site. Instead of baiting the users with functionality and then surprising them with a login dialog, a more user-friendly (and IMO, more honest) approach would be to have both the "follow" and "ignore" buttons greyed out and disabled for anonymous users, and below them add a line that says something like "Log into a Stack Exchange account to follow or ignore questions by tag". That way you're clearly indicating that additional functionality is available when logged in, without misleading users into thinking that they can use something when they can't.

Answer 9

Is there now no button anywhere to ignore a tag? I thought you would have moved it to the tag page or tag wiki page, but no. The only options I found were to input the name of the tag into the ignore list.

Un-ignoring a tag is even worse: You have to fully expand the ignored tags list, then either scan for the tag in the list or use Ctrl+F (ignoring other uses of the same word on the page), then click the X.

References:

• How do I use tags to find topics I'm interested in? § Add watched and ignored tags
• What do "watched tags" and "ignored tags" do? § Ignored Tags

Answer 10

The tag hover tag description change in Experiment 2 seems very harmful (for Stack Overflow at least) because important guidance for mostly off-topic tags is no longer being conveyed upfront. I believe this will result in more off-topic questions being asked and subsequently closed. This could result in a worse experience for new users and more work for reviewers and moderators.

Examples:

• seo. Guidance:

  Note: General SEO questions are off-topic. Only programming-related SEO questions are acceptable on Stack Overflow. Non-programming SEO questions should be asked on Webmasters.SE at https://webmasters.stackexchange.com.

  Hover:
  

• licensing. Guidance:

  THIS TAG IS ONLY FOR PROGRAMMING LICENSING SERVICES. Questions about using software licenses are off-topic, but may be asked at opensource.stackexchange.com or law.stackexchange.com

  Hover:
  

The guidance is there for a reason: to help prevent new users from having their questions closed and, as a result, having a negative experience with their first contributions to the site. Please don't undo this unless you have specific evidence that guidance is ineffective and ignored by all users.

Update There are in fact 121 tags on Stack Overflow that have "off-topic" in their Usage Guidance, as shown by the query from this answer by Glorfindel. I don't think that's a number that can reasonably be fixed manually.

Answer 11

"Follow", as a replacement for "Watch", is unclear.

We already "Follow" questions which leads to receiving notifications and the questions being listed in the "Following" tab. Calling tag watching "Following" mixes the two features even though they're entirely unrelated and don't function similarly. This may lead to people not using it because they don't wish to be bombarded with notifications the same way the other "Follow" tools do. (Or they may use it specifically for that purpose and be disappointed)

Answer 12

"Ignore tag" absence is terrific, but this was already reported several times, so I'll focus on another usability topic.

The "cropped" descriptions are absolutely meaningless on several tags. Here's a tag popup (guacamole) as it was displayed to me right now:

Well. I hovered over that tag to check whether it is correctly used (refers to Apache Guacamole and not some other library or an actual food - things like that happen, right?). Is it possible to tell from this modal? At least not for me.

That must definitely be bad wiki text, right? Right?

Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway with APIs in C, Java, and JavaScript. It supports standard remote desktop protocols like VNC and RDP.

You can see the wiki excerpt above, and the screenshot of a full version at the bottom of this answer.

I would like to keep seeing that description. It is clear, unambiguous and readable.

There is no way anyone can modify all tag descriptions to play well with this system in any reasonable time. It will require lots of community efforts, and many low-activity tags will remain intact anyway. There is no benefit from removing this text either.

Can we just get rid of this "experiment" (and also return "ignore tag" button ASAP)?

If you're not convinced by one tag, here are a few more:

• hashicorp-vault - 1.3k questions, 498 watchers. Popup similar to guacamole - only links rendered as plain text.
• argocd - 609 questions, 447 watchers. Popup is completely empty.
• autodesk - 1.1k questions, 455 watchers. Popup only shows website link.
• tiktok - 223 questions, 286 watchers (what?). Popup reads literally "Official guide".
• cicd - 2.6k questions, 2.2k watchers. Empty popup.

The list above was gathered from part of the first page of "newest questions". In all cases wiki contained some information of marginally higher quality than the text I saw in popup.

Answer 13

I was just served with the version B of this experiment, and I started typing out a Bug question about it - thankfully the search was able to point me to here.

So there is the change compared to the old layout:

New design	Old design

The new design was not based on knowledge of why these tag flyouts are actually used, and instead appears to be inspired by various subscription mechanisms found on social networks.

What these tags flyouts were actually used for is to quickly verify that the use of the tag was justified. That is not obvious in some cases, and then the tag description would specifically indicate when this tag should not be used.

This information can be found on the tag's page (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/tags/excel/info), at the very top of the page, in the important box with the border:

The text from that important box is exactly what was presented in the old flyout - so by hovering your mouse over the tag, you could immediately see if the tag was used appropriately. You could also quickly visit the tag page by clicking View tag.

The new design instead displays the first paragraph of the tag's wiki - which is often a pointless truism for any practical purpose, thus providing no way to verify that the tag was used appropriately. Many tags don't even have a wiki, in which case the flyout does not display anything of use at all.

To verify the use of the tag, one now needs to visit the tag's page itself - which has also been made more difficult because the link to the tag's page is gone from the new flyout. To get to the tag page, you now need to back off from the flyout, click the tag itself, which brings you to the search page of the questions tagged with that tag, and from there click Learn more....

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Out of the three offered options, only A satisfies the functionality requirements - shows the useful part of the tag's wiki page (when the tag should be used) and provides a link to the tag's wiki.

I understand Option Zero (do not change anything at all) is not being offered.

Answer 14

i kinda get why you would want to remove ignore tag from question pages, even though i disagree, but why are we removing it from question list pages as well? Ignoring a tag on that page does in fact have an impact/purpose, why are we making it harder to access this functionality on pages where it has an impact?

Answer 15

Tag improvement is a great endeavor to pursue.

While these A/B tests are interesting, I hope that more can be done with the tag feature itself as it hosts a wealth of information.

Aside from tags actually demarking questions or being a signpost, the tag "more info" section provides a very lucrative section to target for improvement. The testing you show labels it as a wiki which I think is definitely appropriate. Not only is this area a great place to use for content and connections, it is also a very easily targeted space for advertising.

While there was the idea of selling logos on tags for ads some time back, this space would allow the possibility for a relevant company to sponsor the tag wiki.

Regardless of monetization, there is a lot of opportunity for improvement in this feature. I would like to see some sort of sectioning that all tags get. Perhaps just an introduction and a table of contents that in-page navs to different areas.

With regards to the "ignore tag" options, I have used those in the past as well. Usually I will do it if I keep getting a technology overlap in my search results or followed lists. For example, if I am working in C#, I really am not interested in VB.NET, yet without the ignore those solutions will at times show up.

Answer 16

Updated as of 16 July 2024

We have a significant number of anonymous users who are clicking the ignore button on hover for questions. However, this action does nothing for that page, so we want to better understand why they are using it. So, we have this temporary prompt coming up for unregistered users who click the button to ask them their reasoning for selecting this option. Depending on what we learn here, we might make some changes.

OK. I ignore tags because I am not familiar with those topics. Ignoring tags makes it easier to focus on what I do know and better respond to those seeking help.

Having just tried to ignore a tag and find the option was not there was frustrating. Now I have to search thru all the clutter which will do nothing but discourage me from participating on this site.

If you are checking for anonymous/unregistered users, why are you subjecting the regular participants to this?

Please bring back the ignore option.

Answer 17

With the change to "Follow" from "Watch", we lost clarity in the "Unwatch" option.

Currently in the new dialog the "Unfollow" button has a label of "Following" instead of "Unfollow". It's unclear that clicking it will unfollow the tag and clicking it has fairly unsatisfying feedback. The dialog simply closes, you don't see any effect from your click until you reload the page.

Answer 18

This announcement started being about tag hovers ended up changing the tag wiki page and how links to the tag leaderboard page are layed out.

I just found out there's no top link to the top users page on the tag page.

This is a terrible change as I used the leaderboard to check who's an SME on a tag, what top Q&As had been asked in the last 30 days, etc... Its prominence also served as a gamification motivator (and due recognition to invested SMEs) that's now only accessible through a minor href in the right column of the wiki.

This specific change makes the UX to find the tag leaderboard page unappealing to use - it just managed to further demotivate the most engaged users. Last month this change was made (amidst a plethora of other changes) and it took me over 30 days just to realize what had happened because I couldn't wrap my head around all the posts or that we were supposed to react to this.

You buried this core UX issue for SE under a bunch of nonsense announcements about RSS and other features no one uses and virtually nobody cares about.

Terrible change and terrible layout (and a bunch of XY announcements). A step backward in the wrong direction for the tag top users page.