But it’s taking too much of my time, unfortunately, to moderate the swearing one-liner comments out, so I’m going to have to close comments at the 60 mark. Hopefully the thread shows a good range of viewpoints, agreements and disagreements.

Thanks again for reading.

Questions and answers are left-justified, and only the votes (which are important) have more emphasis.

I find Stack Overflow fashionable. Stack Overflow conveys a sense of newness and that it was designed by hand for someone to use. Your design feels more like bland, inoffensive, corporate shrink-wrap forum software sold to big companies for tech support. It feels like lots of time was spent making it look a certain way in the meantime not paying much attention to how users were actually using the site.

For example, tags are very important. It’s true they don’t help answer my specific question, when I have a specific question. In all other cases– I use tags constantly. If I am browsing the site, which I often do after I’ve found an answer, tags are a primary means of navigation.

The related questions box– yours is a token sample and unless your algorithm is amazing there’s probably nothing in the list that will interest me. I can easily process 20 items on a list like that. Do I want 20 primary menu items in my face? No, but for something like “related questions” it’s better.

I don’t think Stack Overflow is perfect, but I do disagree fundamentally on some of Dan’s design priorities. And some of the nitpicks are seriously just nitpicks (the search box? IT never confused me even once). Dan’s design definitely puts more answers on the page, which is my main gripe with Stack Overflow. So many questions have 3+ answers and only 1 or 2 of them are visible without scrolling.

And I would agree that Stack Overflow is pretty ugly. But so was my Grandfather’s basement workshop. Being pretty wasn’t the point.

As ever, a lot of the commenters have rather missed the point, which I thought was well-made: the first-time experience, which most everyone above has either never had (because they joined before it reached its present form) or have long-since passed. Honestly, as a click-by visitor I’d much prefer your rework, partial though it is. I don’t want it for my experience as an established user because the pages I see work very well.

I suppose it’s all about how much the SO guys think it’s worth investing in converting casual droppers-by to registered participants against putting the effort into the Area 51 push to develop new Q&A communities. At the moment, I’d say they were more focused on the interenet Q&A “land grab”. That’s OK, geeks have other hobbies too. Well, some of us do.

The argument also presupposes that developers are qualitatively different than everyone else in how they process information, which is contrary to years of usability research.

The only other thing I’d point out is that Stack Overflow was designed to “wipe out Experts Exchange”: that Stack Overflow would outrank Experts Exchange in organic searches (c.f. http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/). To this stated purpose, deflecting the issue to say that the registered user experience is better or drive-by clickthroughs are unimportant is at best counterproductive.

“I’m sure most regular Stack Overflow users have got used to it and don’t mind. Perhaps they even like it. But a little bit of care over the design could make a huge impact on usability for newcomers”

Clearly most of their active users *do* get used to it and don’t mind. But your second sentence, “perhaps they even like it”, is the one that made me stop and think. I’m just guessing, wildly, that they might even like it not just BECAUSE they “got used to it”, but because they HAD to get used to it. In other words, it could be a variation of the phenomena where an acquired taste is more valuable than one that *everyone* shares.

Given how useful the site actually is, I seriously doubt there was any strategy there to deliberately make it slightly less helpful for first-timers, but… as a strategy for club/community sites, it might not be a bad idea to at least consider doing so. When we’re talking about a club/community/tribe, “user-friendly” does not mean what we think it means.

Think of real world scenarios where activities are personally valued in part *because* they were an acquired taste or something not everyone could easily do. Rock-climbing, sushi, command-line coding. You don’t “rock” because you can do what’s been made super easy for the newbies. You rock because you did the heavy lifting. Or in this case with SO, a tiny bit of lifting The best BEST passion-inducing user experiences are those we earn.

Now, having said all that… there’s quite a lot to the “Don’t Make Me Think” argument. Because the heavy lifting on SO should be in answering the questions. Members should spend every free neuron figuring out how to generate better, cooler, more memorable and helpful explanations. They should be thinking about that while the SO UI disappears. And I’m pretty sure that’s actually the case once people have spent a little time there. And in that case, whatever small confusion they might have early on will either be forgotten or even an unconscious source of pride.

I’m so speculating here, and the special case of SO doesn’t detract from your otherwise very useful and thoughtful suggestions. Were SO a site with the sole purpose of providing answers to searchers, well, that would be a very different story.