How would you improve the Quora website? What will be your strategy to engage more users?

Step 1: Explain your understanding of the product. 

Quora is the world's largest Question and Answer website, the main goal/mission of quora is to encourage people to ask questions and get their questions answered thus building a sense of close knit community. 

People can also follow people, topics of their interest, ask and answer questions etc. 

Step 2: Ask clarifying questions to narrow down the scope of the product/question 

-What do you mean by improve quora website? (Some of the things that we can focus on are improving user engagement, increasing retention, increasing user base )

For the scope of this question it's meantioned that we have to improve user engagement of people on quora. 

- Are we focusing on the mobile based app or web based app? (Mobile)

-IOS or Android? (IOS)

-Are we considering this change/improvement across the globe or for a particular region? (Only for users in US to begin with)

-Do we have any time-line in mind that we are looking for to bring about these changes/improvement? (No)

Step 3: Choose a goal and give your reason for the same.

Like mentioned earlier the main mission of quora is to connect the people across the world and bring them closer together and thus instilling a sense of close knit community where they can ask and answer questions. 

Quora wants it users to spend more and more/max time on the platform. Thus user engagement is definitely one of the key goals for quora and one that aligns with the mission of the company. More/better user engagement will definitely help in acheiving the north star metric of the company. 

Step 4: List down the user groups 

Active/Power Users: These are people who use quora on a regular basis, they ask and answer questions and have a decent amount of following

Casual Users: These are users that seldom use quora, they hardly/don't post any content on quora, however they do read or go through content.

Influencers/Authors: These are celebrities basically that have huge amount of following on quora.

Small companies/Organisations

Large companies/Corporations

Step 5: Select one user group and give your reason for the same. 

For the scope of this question we will be considering casual users as our target user group as this is the largest user segment on the app and if we can find ways for them to engage on the app, i.e to post more content on a regular basis we can effectively increase the engagement of app as a whole. 

Hence i chose this user group. 

Step 6: List down the user pain-points

Casual Users: 

1) They don't know which topics to follow

2) They don't know how to determine the authenticity of the information/answer

3) Want a better way to search for answer or questions 

4) Have no incentive to ask questions and engage with other people's content 

6) Want help/assistance/tips/feedback to their answers and question

7) Often times they don't want the answers to be available to everyone 

8) Want to save and share answers with their friends

9) Want to know what new content is being posted by  the people they are following

Step 7: Prioritise the user pain-points based on meaningful criterias like: Impact to end user, Impact to business value 

For the scope of this question we have categorised pain-points # 1,2,3,4 and 6

Step 8: List down the solutions for the prioritised pain-points 

1) They don't know which topics to follow

A) Survey tab: Ask the user a list of questions like what kind of topics/things is the user interested in to come up with a fine-tuned list of topics that the person may like.

B) AI-based recommendation(Friends based) : Recommend topics based on interests, previous search history, what topics their friends are liking and searching etc

2) They don't know how to determine the authenticity of the information/answer

A) Verified tag: Answers whose authenticity has been verified by the appropriate sources have a verified tag associated next to it. This gives user a great clarity in terms of what answer to belive and what not to

3) Want a better way to search for answer or questions 

A) Voice based search: Users can easily search for topics of their choice or questions that they have in mind using this feature.

B) Meta-data search feature: Search by asking a combination of questions, making the search experience very easy and user friendly.

4) Have no incentive to ask questions and engage with other people's content 

A) Point based badge system: Engage with other people's content and ask questions and receive points. Earn points and get badges and higher up on the leaderboard. Higher the rank more are the chances to win goodies and prizes.

6) Want help/assistance/tips/feedback to their answers and questions

A) AI based scorer: Which scores and gives feedback to the answers and type of questions asked and give suggestions/tips on how to improve it.

B) Articles and videos which consists of tips to better ask and answer questions

Step 9: Prioritise the solutions based on meaningful criterias like: Impact to end user, implementation effort, implementation cost. 

Based on the above criterias we have prioritised the following solutions. 

1A, 2 A, 4A

Step 10: List down the metrics that you'll track for these features/solutions

1 A) Survey tab: Ask the user a list of questions like what kind of topics/things is the user interested in to come up with a fine-tuned list of topics that the person may like.

avg # of users who click this feature on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to fine-tune their recommendations

2 A) Verified tag: Answers whose authenticity has been verified by the appropriate sources have a verified tag associated next to it. This gives user a great clarity in terms of what answer to belive and what not to

% of total answers that have been verified

Avg engagement score (likes+comments+shares+views) on verified answers vs avg engagement score on answers which are not verifiied. 

DAU, WAU,MAU of this feature

4 A) Point based badge system: Engage with other people's content and ask questions and receive points. Earn points and get badges and higher up on the leaderboard. Higher the rank more are the chances to win goodies and prizes.

Avg # of points per user on quora

% of total users who have received more than 50 points in the past 6 months

Step 11: Sumarize your answer

Product Description:

Quora's mission is to allow anyone in the world to share their knowledge. The platform enables everyone to ask and answer questions on any topic. The users can also upvote, downvote, comment for other's answers. The platform also gives the option to user's to follow each other, which will result in getting more content from the person they are following. 

Product Scope:

Our current scope is to improve user engagement in the platform across channels (Web, Android, Ios, etc.). Some of the key metrics to track here 

• Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU)/(MAU)
• User Stickiness (Ratio between DAU & MAU)
• D7, D30 User Retention

• Power Users: The users are kind of experts on the platform, they will ask and answer more questions, comments and spend more time daily
• The users who read a lot but won't answer any questions
• The users who landed from other platforms for a particular question (e.g. Google search)

• They may find more options in search engines (Different Viewpoints)
• The issue with the authenticity of the answer (The Quora answers are mostly opinions and biased without data backup)
• Search engines are more comfortable and faster than Quora.

I want to address the 2nd issue. i.e.) authenticity of the answer

Solutions:

• Provide verification batch for each correct answer
• Provide batches like (Platinum, Gold etc.,) for each answer as well as users based criteria like 
  • User's Expertise Background like Education, Experience to answer a particular topic
  • Number of Upvotes (More), Downvotes (Less) & Comments
• Provide Quick Summary of all the correct answers if one question has multiple answers