Quality Update: July 2020

Quality consists of a number of different parts or variables. At the highest level, we think of quality as the person receiving what they were hoping to receive. When a person has quality experiences, they are more likely to feel safe, valued, and experience personal growth.

Here are a couple of examples of quality experiences. If I am a member struggling with anxiety, then a really high quality experience would be for me to connect with an excellent listener who understands me and how anxiety works. I would feel better after the chat. If I connect with a listener and it is not a good experience, then I do not feel heard or understood. That is not a quality experience for me.

Now, lets turn to the listener side. As a listener, I want to provide support to a person genuinely seeking help, and further develop my listening skills. When I have that opportunity, I feel great. I was able to show compassion and help another person. This is a quality experience for me as a listener. If a member is trolling me, then that is not a quality listening experience for me.

We also have to keep in mind that 7 Cups is a system (more on 7 cups as a system here) meaning that it is more than just a collection of individuals operating on a Website and apps. Think about the weather. There are a lot of variables that influence the weather, even small things not obviously related to the weather can impact a weather system.The key point to keep in mind here is that one change can have unexpected changes in another area that are not immediately obvious.

Another key piece to understand here is that we cannot disclose all that we do on 7 Cups to increase quality because a) we are testing something and we need a natural environment to test it in; b) what we test may or may not work so we do not want to announce a change until we know it will work; c) If we announce a change, then people with negative intentions will learn of the change and work around it to harass people. I understand that it can be frustrating to see a minor change here or there that is not announced. The above is context for why that happens. The vast majority of these changes should only impact new members or new listeners.

A related process here is that sometimes people have good ideas on 7 Cups and they help us a lot. Other times people have ideas that they think are really good, but they end up not really holding up as either weve tested them in the past, or we know from prior experiences that they likely will not work. Related here is the idea of engineering time. That is how much time we spend on something to make a change. If we can test a smaller version of the idea to see if it has any results, then it takes less time and gives us a lot of data. If we spend a lot of time on a solution and it doesnt yield results, then that can be difficult. It is good that we learned, but not so good that we invested a lot of time into a solution that didnt make things better.

One last thing to consider, and then we can talk through specifics. Many of us have a bias towards action - that is doing more. And doing more can be helpful, but sometimes taking away can be helpful too. E.g., with some types of addictive behavior (food, drugs, alcohol, games), simply doing less of the behavior can be healing. When we think of quality behaviors, we need to think of things we can do more of (better and more personalized training for listeners), but also what we can bracket and or remove (people with negative intentions) to enable our community to grow stronger.

With that foundation in place, lets begin to think of things we have done and can iterate on, things we should remove or make more challenging for people with negative intentions, and things we should proactively do to better address quality. Below is a list of actions we have taken, but remember that this list is not comprehensive as we cannot share all we are doing (see above explanation). Please also feel free to share your ideas in this thread.

Members:

Block/Remove New Members that are Trolling - We have made gains and we are working hard to get better at predicting people that are trolling so that they cannot tax our community. We believe that these are often smart and creative people and we want to find ways to help them develop other parts of their personality so that they can find life more meaningful and fulfilling. The hope is that someday people with these intentions will use their resources to help others in unique and smart ways.

Better Matching - We want members to get connected with the best listeners that can provide them the best support. Right now we do this by people selecting topics (anxiety, depression), but this can evolve and get smarter. Ill share more on this later.

Member Email Verification - We require this for group support right now and will explore it for 1:1s as well. We tested this in the past and the results were inconclusive so we need to test again to see if it, along with other changes, may have a more amplified impact. We do strive to make it as easy and as non-threatening as possible for people to get help so we want to preserve this approach as much as we can.

Listeners:

Additional Training - at present, new listeners need to complete our active listening course, pass a test, pass a test with a chatbot that acts like a student with depression, and then make an oath to treat people with dignity and respect. As some of you have pointed out, the most significant challenges - as with all fields - emerges from new listeners with less experience. Helping new listeners learn more is one key area we will be focusing on and ideas are welcome here!

Listener Support Room (LSR) - We recently added a new button next to the chat window that says need help with this chat to help prompt new listeners to get support in the LSR. We found many more clicks on that button than we have in the past. However, we did not see more messages in that room. This suggested that there were more new listeners going to the room, but they were not engaging as much. We have since implemented a new protocol to increase support for new listeners. Look for more on this front soon. We have a lot of ideas on how we can provide new listeners increased support and guidance.

Mock Chat Videos - Obs is working with the quality team to create a catalog of mock chat videos so that listeners can watch how to handle different scenarios.

AI Chatbot that Acts as Different Members - We are working with researchers to develop different member scenarios/mock chats for listeners to practice active listening. If the initial results are positive, then in October listeners will be able to choose different scenarios (new member, member with depression etc.) from Noni. The listener will then be able to see what they did well and what they can improve upon.

AI Chatbot Coach - If the above results are positive, then in November Noni will have a mentor/coach option where she will provide feedback on what steps to take to best help a member. E.g., You can imagine her highlighting an emotion that a member is sharing or prompting the listener to ask an open ended question. When I was training to be a psychologist, I would have a supervisor behind a one-way mirror and a little bug in my ear where she would coach me on things to say or questions to ask. This is the same idea here.

We are making quality a primary focus this quarter. The above provides context to the work we are doing and also highlights our initial list of changes and experiments. If you have other ideas, then please share them below.

Thank you!