Fast, functional, and fitting: expert response dynamics and response quality in an online newcomer help forum

  • Authors:

  • Hon Jie Teo;Aditya Johri

  • Affiliations:

  • Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA;George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

In online communities a few experts are able to help a large number of help-seekers -- whether in Q&A communities or other forms of online forums. How is this efficiency achieved? How useful is this help? We show that expert help-giving can be characterized as: (1) Fast -- Most active help-givers gave response promptly and were most responsive during peak activity; (2) Functional -- There was little duplication of help-giving effort; and, (3) Fitting -- Initial responses were of high quality and reduced the need for further clarifications and corrections; high quality responses were provided earlier in the thread. Examination of differences across experts revealed that the most highly rated group of experts responded to 69% of the questions with a median response time of 16 minutes, twice as fast as other experts. Finally, we demonstrate the high quality of response through a taxonomy that characterizes expert responses as: framing, guiding, or engaged help.