Do we want a community blog?

Question

We've started Step 2 of getting a blog, defining our scope. If you want to make it happen, please participate in that discussion.

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It's possible for a Stack Exchange site to get it's own blog provided we follow some steps to prove a couple things:

1. We want it
2. We can make it happen

So you know, the community will take part in posting and vetting the articles, and we'll try and nail down the following before we actually get it:

1. The Scope
2. Who will contribute (tentative, we're not locked in to only certain people contributing)
3. The schedule

As a starting point I really like the Question of the Week (QotW) concept on Security. I think it'd be a great starting point, taking the hottest question of the week and digging into the issue a bit deeper all in one post for easy consumption.

Remember the Blog can be more than a "greatest hits" of our questions/answers. We can also use it to share interesting news and opinions on happenings in the UX field or even design tips if we wanted.

Is this something we want? The next step would be to define what we want the blog to be about, first I want to know if the support is there. Please vote to indicate your approval and if you have any good suggestions, make them in an answer for when we start the next steps. We'll also need to know who's willing to write and what we want to write about.

Answer 1

Here are a few quick ideas for scope.

Directly supporting our core work:

• Highlighting the community's best work
• Calling attention to particular important issues in depth
• Revisiting and updating "core" or "classic" questions

Opinion-based content that doesn't fit our normal work but is interesting:

• Summarising and discussing latest developments and issues in the UX field
• Highlighting important meta.ux posts
• Working with other stackexchange communities (migration/collaboration)

Answer 2

Here's an idea for the community blog that could help to grow the audience, and draw attention to the site. A monthly UX angel service, with some kind of superhero theme.

• Choose a product (web site, software, smart phone, lava lamp, pen, car, space ship, etc)
• Do a UX review of the product (either focussed on a specific feature, or more broad)
• Make recommendations for improvements
• Do re-designs of certain components
• Write it all up in a beautiful blog post

Each article would probably require 4-5 UX'ers to participate. And there would need to be a style guide and/or writing guide to maintain consistency. The value to the recipient of this review could be estimated at $1-5k, so being selected could become some kind of competition, which offers opportunities to draw attention to the site and grow the community.

This would be a lot of work! but would be really cool.

Answer 3

An interesting idea from an old suggestion is running our own usability studies. It's not something I'm set up to do myself, but if we could make it work it would be awesome to have blog posts sharing original research, especially answering questions from the site that don't already have research-backed answers.

I don't want to sign us up for anything too huge, but it'd be easy to conduct some simple A/B tests, perhaps using Usara or other online services if no one wants to donate their lab.

Answer 4

Scope (what the blog will be about):

• Usability Studies (A/B Testing?)
• Question of the Week
• Add Items here

Who will be involved:

• Christofian
• Ben Brocka
• Andrew Shipe
• Add your name here

Schedule:

• Once a week, mayby more if we have some interesting usability studies set up.

Feel free to edit this post.

Answer 5

I don't see that a community blog is really needed. I admit that I'm not very active but from time to time I look at ux-stackexchange. And I don't really see the benefit for a community blog.