These buttons/tabs (leaving tags, users and badges out) are available:
- Stack Overflow -> active = Questions that have been asked, answered or updated recently
- Stack Overflow -> featured = Questions with an active bounty
- Stack Overflow -> hot = Questions with the most activity and interest in the last few days
- Stack Overflow -> week = Questions with the most activity and interest this week
- Stack Overflow -> month = Questions with the most activity and interest this month
- questions -> recent = The most recently asked questions
- questions -> featured = Questions with open bounty
- questions -> hot = Questions with recent interest and activity
- questions -> votes = Questions with the most votes
- questions -> active = Questions that have recent activity
- unanswered -> my tags = Questions with tags I've participated
- unanswered -> newest = Newest unanswered questions
- unanswered -> votes = Highest voted unanswered questions
Now, for the expert user, maybe these all are very different. But for the newbie (hell, even I don't understand it despite frequenting the site) it's difficult to get a grip on what everything means and how they are different.
Some of my issues:
1-5 : It took me forever to understand that you could click on the site logo to get to this page with these five hidden tabs. For a long time, I thought the homepage was in fact the questions page. Apparently, when you go to the site by a bookmark or typing in the URL, you land on this page, but when you click on any of the "unanswered," "badges," "users," "tags" or "questions" buttons, it's unclear that you can actually get back to this first view. A part of the problem might be that none of the buttons is highlighted to indicate where you are in the navigation.
3, 8: What's the difference?
2, 7: What's the difference? Is there a difference between active and open bounties? And why is the layout slightly different? On page 2, the number of questions is in the tab, but on page 7 it is put in big letters on the right. Also the tabs seem to have shifted and changed size.
3, 4, 5: Why not have a range slider? Which is defaulted to one day. But one can tweak it to say last week, last month, or even September 1976 if needed.
6, 12: What's the difference? On page 12 I clearly also see answered questions listed.
9: Not much value in this page since it always has the exact same questions listed ("Hidden features of C#", I'm looking at you).
Also, terms like "activity," "interest" and "last few days" are vague. Especially since you don't see them come back as numbers or measurements in the questions or answers themselves.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem might be. I'm just saying that, as it is now, there seems to be a lot of overlap and confusion in the various views available.
I would see more value in a view where one can set a date range widget, a filter, tags perhaps, some options and choose the ordering. (It'd be nice to be able to save these as personal presets.) But that might be a different meta question/discussion altogether. ;^)