Questions vs. conversations

I can touch on the last thought. There hasn’t been any internal discussions to get rid of topic type delineation. Distinguishing between questions and discussions helps communities identify support content in the search because topics with a best answer selected are prioritized. 

Just to add to what Jeanie said: When questions are marked as answered, Google can understand what is the question and what is the answer. This is then being used to create “rich results”, which can display the valid answer (and the question of course) directly on the Google search results page.

This is a big advantage for the user experience and customer effort. By the way, you can easily test if content supports this format on this page. On Google, it will look like this then:

I am wondering though until what extend you are experiencing that users confuse the two. Other communities usually don’t really have a problem with this, you are probably right with your suspicion that it has to do with coming from Slack.

Maybe an option could be to better explain when to use what on the content creation page? We have hidden e.g. the option to start a discussion topic before, this is possible. But to hide the question option is something I personally would not recommend for the reasons mentioned above.

Thanks @Jeanie Lee and @Julian 

To answer your question, Julian, it happens about 90% of the time. I was thinking that if there is a better delineation in the description of each question type (that appears on hover) it would help so was curious on how inSided sees them as different. Particularly since not all questions end with a best answer. 

I’ve recently updated our text for each type to see if it helps:

• Use when you have a question
• Use when you want to share something or start a discussion

With my previous community we used the Phrases control to address similar confusion, moving from nouns to action-based phrases: 

• Ask a Question
• Create a post
• Submit an idea

We changed from conversation to “post” because our user feedback indicated that “conversation” didn’t really resonate with them, whereas the action of “posting” is pretty universal across other social platforms. That solved a FAQ of “how do I just post something?” 

With my new community, our initial rollout is a focused use case around support/self-service Q&A … and we decided to use CSS to hide the topic type options altogether. This will likely change over time when we have conversation use cases, but we found it simplified the UX for what we need now. (When we rollout ideation, the CTA button you can put on the ideation landing page will open pre-selected to the idea type, so hiding it still gets them the correct type.)

My two cents: some of the confusion comes from different use cases for different forums… especially conversation-focused forums (question as the default topic type creates more corrections/conversions to conversations). 

I believe there’s an idea for this, but the ability to configure with topic types are allowed for a certain category/forum/group -- and in what order -- would be a really nice improvement. Although it’d make an inconsistent UX across different places. 

Thanks for the insights @DannyPancratz - we’re very verb-based too so might have to explore that with our community and see what they think of changing the naming. We don’t use ideation (the benefits of Productboard is that we have an approach to that already in our product).