A better notification of significant modifications on the trilogy?

Question

The SO-family is nicely evolving, day by day, there are new features, changes, etc. These changes, however, are not clear nor explained to the non-regular user.

This was discussed a bit earlier there, and answered by Jeff. In case of a new feature, or major change, there is usually a blog post going with it, to explain. And before, there is a "status-completed" on Meta, or a mention in the podcast.

The problem is that I think easily 80% of the people coming to the S[OFU] sites don't follow the blog, never heard the podcast, or never set foot on Meta either. They only come to their regular site to ask questions, or give answers.

Even more regular users are surprised by new features. The big FAQ change on SU went completely unnoticed, not even a blog post. The reputation recalc generated countless "Dude, where's my rep?" questions. The bounty system change, even if only adding a functionality, is confusing some users as well.

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So what can be done to improve communication to most of users?

There is a notification area used sometimes on top of the recent questions, why isn't this used to communicate on every new feature or such major change? With a message like:

We just added a Linked sidebar to the question page! Read more about it here.

In the end, if you provide a new feature to users without explaining it, presenting it, it's useless to them, or worse, it's confusing them.

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Edit: this proposition is to notify the majority of users of important changes, not to have a changelog for any modification. This other case is discussed in this question.

Answer 1

Aww, my "funny" answer got deleted. My serious answer:

The problem is that I think easily 80% of the people coming to the S[OFU] sites don't follow the blog, never heard the podcast, or never set foot on Meta either. They only come to their regular site to ask questions, or give answers.

Right, so why would we pester them with an endless stream of minutiae about what we changed on the website? They're here to ask, answer, and comment, not to obsess over every little feature.

I mean, we do, so we read the blog, so we hang out on meta, and that's because we enjoy it. Which is fine but the average user could care less, and I don't blame them.

In any case there are already notifications in place, for almost every change:

• check [status-completed] tags here on http://meta.stackoverflow.com
• read https://blog.stackoverflow.com

My general philosophy is that the functioning of the website should be obvious, without any serious explanation necessary (hint tooltips and good design should be sufficient). If it isn't, then we're just doing it wrong.

(and the behavior of the Linked sidebar is, IMNSHO, quite obvious.. it's stuff.. that is linked.. to this post)

See: The paradox of the active user

a common observation in several user studies done at the IBM User Interface Institute in the early 1980s (later confirmed by many other studies, including my own): Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately. They are motivated to get started and to get their immediate task done: they don't care about the system as such and don't want to spend time up front on getting established, set up, or going through learning packages.

The "paradox of the active user" is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it. But that's not how people behave in the real world, so we cannot allow engineers to build products for an idealized rational user when real humans are irrational: we must design for the way users actually behave.

Answer 2

I think a Change List (just on Meta) would be great.

We could then check it easily every now and then, instead of having to constantly browse the status-completed tag.

They could also set it up to ding our Recent Activity envelope, but if not, at least just give us a simple list of changes. Those of us on Meta who care, care about those little changes, that usually don't get mentioned in the blog.

Answer 3

One thing you can do is watch meta on Sunday evenings. I tend to get on about 8:30 (central) for a few minutes and almost always there's a set of new set of questions on the main page marked status-completed. After the first couple times I noticed this by chance I made a point of making sure I saw the meta question list each week before they roll off the front page. There's not something up there every week, but most of the time it's worth the trouble.

If you wanted to take that and turn it into something that easier to follow (like a change log) no one would stop you.

Of course, now that I've pointed out to the Jeff the rut he's in he might change that behavior ;)