User Quiz | Learn the names of your colleagues

Are you working remotely? Are you new in a department or company? Isn't it hard to learn all the new names?Not anymore. User Quiz helps you to learn names easily.

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Inspiration

In the past year, many people started to work remotely. Working from home reduced a lot of social situations to meet new coworkers. And when you meet them eventually, you sometimes just don't know their names.

Besides the current situation, many reasons make it hard to keep track of new names, like being new at your company or working at a fast-growing department.

I work in such a company. It grew from 70 employees in 2013 to over 200 in 2021. I always tried to keep myself updated with all the new names. To help myself, I created a user quiz and shared it with my colleagues. Now I wanted to have such a user quiz running in Confluence Cloud.

What it does

User quiz provides a macro with a configurable quiz. The app loads users from the Confluence search or a user group.

Quiz round with an correct answer

Users don’t have to guess the name on the first attempt. Wrong answers are marked red. This way, users learn new names while playing a fun game. Still, fewer attempts reward the users with more points for the high score.

Quiz round with two wrong answers

The collected points will appear in the high score, and users can compare each other and motivate other colleagues to join the challenge.

High score

To increase the difficulty, the app can show names filtered by a suggested gender based on the first name of the user.

New quiz round

If the suggestion doesn’t work for some first names, the quiz creator can overwrite the assignment in the macro configuration.

User Quiz macro configuration

What problems does it solve?

It makes learning names in your department or company easy and fun.

How we built it

I built the app with Atlassian Forge and a React app as Custom UI.

Challenges we ran into

There were some challenges regarding the immaturity or inconsistency of Confluence Cloud APIs. I'll report them in detail to the Forge project in the ecosystem JIRA.

Besides that, the biggest challenge was to port the gender suggestion for first names to the Forge backend. Without this suggestion feature, it's often too easy to rule out names by gender associations. For example, imagine a picture of a person with a beard, and the quiz asks you if the user's name is Marc, Lisa, Sophie, or Aylin?

That said, it's not my intention to promote a binary gender model, and the feature is turned off by default. But if users what to increase the difficulty of the quiz, this is an option.

Some names are ambiguous, and it is possible to overwrite the suggestions for such users. For example, in most countries, Sascha is more likely to be a female first name. But in Germany, it's typically a male first name. Therefore you can add the user to the list "Show with male names".

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My existing name dataset for an on-premise app had 90K entries. I feared that loading this whole data set into the memory of the Forge backend would lead to serious performance issues.

I'm pretty proud that I accomplished porting this gender suggestion and ended up with a performant implementation. I developed heuristics to reduce the footprint and reduced the size of the dataset from 90K names and 1,2MB to 25K names and 380K. For example, 97% of the first names ending with the letter "a" are mostly female. This simple assumption reduced the dataset by 28K names.

I tested the API with 1.700 names at once, and the service answered within 3-4 seconds. And seriously, how wants to do a Quiz with 1.700 users? So I think I have enough safety margin for my use case.

What we learned

I learned a lot about developing with Atlassian Forge. It is fun to develop for this platform, and with "forge tunnel" the development cycle feels pleasant. It is only annoying when you run into APIs limitations and inconsistencies.

What's next for User Quiz | Learn the names of your colleagues

Although this was a private project, I'm curious to test this app at my employer and to use it to learn the names of new colleagues. I hope I'll get valuable feedback from my colleagues and people who notice the app at Codegeist 2021.

The high score system is very extensible, and I think it would be fun to compete in different categories, like perfect rounds.

Another idea is to introduce a flashcard mode that shows you the names where you struggled in the quiz.

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