Justin Matejka
k j

IP-QAT: In-Product Questions, Answers, & Tips

Justin Matejka, Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice
January 2011 · Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)

Abstract

We present IP-QAT, a new community-based question and answer system for software users. Unlike most community forums, IP-QAT is integrated into the actual software application, allowing users to easily post questions, answers and tips without having to leave the application. Our in-product implementation is context-aware and shows relevant posts based on a user's recent activity. It is also designed with minimal transaction costs to encourage users to easily post, include annotated images and file attachments, as well as tag their posts with relevant UI components. We describe a robust cloud-based system implementation, which allowed us to release IP-QAT to 37 users for a 2 week field study. Our study showed that IP-QAT increased user contributions, and subjectively, users found our system more useful and easier to use, in comparison to the existing commercial discussion board.

DOI PDF

Figures

Figure 1. IP-QAT system interface overview.
Figure 2. Prexperience (D). The rolle
re 3. Dialog for posting a question or tip.
igure 4. Image portion of the posting dialog box.
Figure 5. Interface elements for individual topics.
5. Tooltip interface for quick brow Nhen available, images are also disp
Figure 7. The view/reply window showing the textual post content as well as a link to open the source file (A), the version of the program the post originated from (B) and the relevant commands (C).
Figure 8. Inkeyword seyou marked
Figure 9. C
Figure 10. Distribution of user's pre-existing habits of looking at, and contributing to, online forums.
Figure 11. Mean number of posts contributed per user. (Note: error bars report standard error)
Figure 12. Number of new topics created.
Figure 13. Subjective results for "/t is useful when people post tips, as opposed to only questions and answers." and “I find images helpful for explaining and answering questions.”
Figure 14. Median Time-to-First-Answer (Minutes).
Figure 15. Total number of images used.
Figure 16. Subjective results comparing the /P-QAT and forum community help conditions.
Figure 17. Visualization of all topics created during the study. (Note: this is a vector graphic, zoom in to see in more detail)
Figure 18. Two example conversations. Between two users (A), and many unique users (B).
Figure 19. “Topic Viewed” dots showing a resur-gence of interest in a thread after a new post is made.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/2047196.2047218,
 abstract = {We present IP-QAT, a new community-based question and answer system for software users. Unlike most community forums, IP-QAT is integrated into the actual software application, allowing users to easily post questions, answers and tips without having to leave the application. Our in-product implementation is context-aware and shows relevant posts based on a user's recent activity. It is also designed with minimal transaction costs to encourage users to easily post, include annotated images and file attachments, as well as tag their posts with relevant UI components. We describe a robust cloud-based system implementation, which allowed us to release IP-QAT to 37 users for a 2 week field study. Our study showed that IP-QAT increased user contributions, and subjectively, users found our system more useful and easier to use, in comparison to the existing commercial discussion board.},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 author = {Matejka, Justin and Grossman, Tovi and Fitzmaurice, George},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
 doi = {10.1145/2047196.2047218},
 isbn = {9781450307161},
 keywords = {help, in-product learning, Q&A, community},
 location = {Santa Barbara, California, USA},
 numpages = {10},
 pages = {175–184},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 series = {UIST '11},
 title = {IP-QAT: In-Product Questions, Answers, & Tips},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2047196.2047218},
 year = {2011}
}