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 use 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.