Q&A (Ask) Experience

Overview

Between 2016–2019, The Coral Project (a collaboration among Mozilla, The New York Times, and The Washington Post) built open‑source tools to help newsrooms listen to and talk with their communities. The Q&A/“Ask” product let editors invite questions from readers, route them to reporters or vetted guests, and publish curated answers with full auditability.

Problem

Open comment threads and “live chats” were noisy, adversarial, and time‑intensive to moderate. Reporters needed a way to surface real questions worth answering—without exposing participants to harassment or turning the newsroom into unpaid tech support.

Principle: elevate authentic questions, protect participants, and keep editors in control.

Product Approach

Instead of another free‑for‑all thread, Q&A used a structured funnel:

• Collect – Hosted prompts and forms with topical framing, clear consent, name display options, and optional demographic fields.
• Triage – A review queue with de‑duplication, off‑topic filters, risk signals, and assignments to subject‑matter owners.
• Answer – Drafting space for reporters/guests with verification checks, tone guidance, and lightweight review.
• Publish – Clean, skimmable layouts with linkable answers and attribution; embeddable on articles or topic hubs.
• Close the loop – Auto receipts, status updates, and “why we chose this question” messaging to build trust.

Designing the Experience

These principles shaped the interface and system behaviors:

• Signal over stream – Prompts and categories to elicit higher‑quality questions; duplicates rolled up, not amplified.
• Consent by design – Clear choices for name display, contact permission, and what will be public.
• Safety guardrails – Rate limits, blocklists, and moderation shortcuts tuned for newsroom workflows.
• Editor ergonomics – Bulk actions, assignment cues, and answer templates that respect deadline pressure.
• Accessibility & i18n – Keyboard flows, semantic markup, and string management for multilingual newsrooms.
• CMS‑agnostic – Designed to embed alongside Coral Talk or any CMS with minimal friction.

My Role

• Led product design from discovery through pilot rollouts across multiple desks.
• Ran newsroom research: interviews, desk observations, and co‑design workshops with editors and moderators.
• Mapped end‑to‑end workflows; prototyped flows and UI states; partnered tightly with PM and engineering.
• Authored UI copy and submission consent patterns; created answer templates and editorial guidance.
• Defined success metrics with partners and instrumented events for learning, not vanity.

Impact

• Provided a structured alternative to open “live chats,” reducing moderation load while raising answer quality.
• Reframed audience participation from “perform in comments” to “ask questions and see results.”
• Patterns from Q&A informed later “submit a question” and expert‑led explainer formats in community products.

How Q&A differs from comments

• Questions are routed and curated, not posted as a live thread.
• Answers are edited and attributed, not lost in a scroll.
• Participants opt into name display; defaults are privacy‑protective.
• The interface nudges quality (prompts, categories, examples) over volume.