A/B test different top nav button flavors for question creation page link

[leonardthethird]

Context

Question submission has been declining slowly over a long period. We'd like to try various things to reverse the trend. Funneling more users to the question creation page seems like a good thing to try.

Feature description

Consistent with this thread, A/B test some variations of the top nav button.

[aseckin]

Let's do a 4-way test to measure the impact of wording & emphasis:

• A: '+ Create'
• B: '+ Create' with emphasis
• C: '+ Submit a Question'
• D: '+ Submit a Question' with emphasis

Link to Figma

My guess is, emphasis and wording will slightly help bring more traffic to the page, but it won't have a meaningful impact on the number of questions submitted.

My previous thoughts for improving question writing:

Some type of question writing assistant (use an LLM to fill in certain fields) and different organization of the form (step-by-step with visual progress indicators, rather than one big form) better communication of the incentives (question writing leaderboard) being able to save drafts and preview the question are some ideas worth thinking about if we want to tackle this as a project.

[elisescu]

@claude use posthog.getFeatureFlag('create_question_button_type') and modify front_end/src/app/(main)/components/headers/hooks/useNavbarLinks.tsx (check the LINKS constant, key createQuestion ) to show one of the 4 buttons for creating a new question. posthog will return experiment_<A|B|C|D> corresponding to the different button types in the screenshot from Figma. Make sure you support both light and dark themes.

[claude]

Claude finished @elisescu's task —— View job • claude/issue-3364-20251015-1002 • Create PR ➔

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Implementation Complete ✓

Summary

I've successfully implemented the 4-way A/B test for the question creation button as requested. The implementation uses PostHog feature flags to dynamically render different button variants.

Changes Made

Modified files:

1. front_end/src/app/(main)/components/headers/hooks/useNavbarLinks.tsx

   • Added PostHog import
   • Created getCreateButtonConfig() helper function that reads the feature flag create_question_button_type
   • Updated the createQuestion link to dynamically render based on experiment variant
   • Added conditional styling for emphasized variants with full light/dark theme support

2. front_end/messages/en.json

   • Added "submitAQuestion": "submit a question" translation key

Button Variants

The implementation supports these 4 experiment variants:

• experiment_A: "+ Create" (no emphasis) - control variant
• experiment_B: "+ Create" (with rounded blue background for emphasis)
• experiment_C: "+ Submit a Question" (no emphasis)
• experiment_D: "+ Submit a Question" (with rounded blue background for emphasis)

Technical Details

• Uses posthog.getFeatureFlag('create_question_button_type') to determine which variant to display
• Falls back to experiment_A (control) if no flag is set
• Emphasized buttons use: rounded-full bg-blue-400 dark:bg-blue-500 px-3 py-1 hover:bg-blue-500 dark:hover:bg-blue-600
• Both light and dark theme colors are properly handled

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Branch: claude/issue-3364-20251015-1002 | [Job Run](https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/actions/runs/${{ github.run_id }})