New post summary designs on site home pages and greatest hits now; everywhere else eventually

Question

Update 3 - 2022-02-01

We've rolled out another small set of changes + bugfixes. The largest change was that we removed the yellow from watched tags entirely, leaving just the new "watched" icon.

We've also added this answer where we lay out our next steps.

Update 2 - 2022-01-27

We've pushed some layout changes live. When reviewing the given feedback as a whole, we've identified a few major themes:

• Stats are too hard to pick apart, "votes" in particular
• New watched/ignored states are not bright enough/too bright (respectively) and cause too much trailing whitespace

We've made the following changes to alleviate these issues:

• Bumped up the size of stats
• Gave more visible weight to "votes"
• Gave less visible weight to "supernova" view counts by removing the :fire: icon
• Removed "watched" state label, restored the yellow background and adding highlighting/icon to the individual tags that are causing the watched status
• Removed "ignored" state label, added icon to the individual tags that are causing the ignored state

This latest set of changes also includes a number of bug fixes. We're still discussing how to better improve this component. There is still some extra whitespace at the end when there is no body excerpt and a bounty exists on the post (though, this is generally still less trailing whitespace than the current design on /questions, which has a body excerpt). Thank you for your continued feedback.

Update 1 - 2022-01-25

Most of the reported bugs have been squashed. We're currently gathering together all the discussion and feature-request feedback items to decide how we want to alter the design. Thank you everyone for your feedback.

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Original Post

tl;dr

We’re starting a rollout of the new post summary design to many existing screens, starting with greatest hits. This will be a slow rollout, with only one set of related screens changing at a time.

What we’re shipping now

We’ve built a new component to replace the existing post summary implementation. We aimed for ~100% data compatibility with this implementation so that users are not losing any statistics or features. That being said, our desire to leave the existing data intact as much as possible has led to sub-optimal layouts in a few uncommon scenarios, particularly for the display of community wiki posts. Work on these experiences is ongoing and will improve over time.

For the initial announcement, we’ve migrated /questions/greatest-hits to use the new implementation. This way, users can have a tangible example they can use today, before we roll out the design to more and more screens. Why did we choose greatest hits to start with? It was an ideal screen for many reasons:

• Entirely standalone - no dependencies on other screens/processes and not depended on
• Low user impact - low traffic, infrequently referenced and not terribly well known (even among employees!)
• Uses the exact same component code and layout as /questions - users can see this as a very close preview for what will be shipping there later on
• In disrepair - the screen was already showing some signs of neglect and really needed some love <3

Before

After

What we’re shipping later

In addition to greatest hits, we’re aiming to roll this new design out site-wide. The areas we’re concentrating on first are the main areas of the site that still have mobile-only layouts. As we remove our final mobile views, we need to ensure that the remaining responsive views actually look good on smaller screens. More specifically, the following high traffic views are next on our list:

• / (home / recent questions) - our “QuestionMini” layout
• /questions/* (question list, list by tag, search, etc) - our “QuestionSummary” layout
  

Work on these screens has progressed fairly far already due to most of the necessary work being in the creation and implementation of the underlying component. However, we’ve decided to hold off on the rollout until after the community has had an opportunity for processing the design changes and to offer us feedback.

Eventually, everything will be the new post-summary design, but it may be some time before the changes reach the long tail of our many different views.

Where we are currently using this design

Despite my claims above that this is a “new” design, we’ve been using it in a number of places across the site for quite some time. A (non-inclusive) list of places that are already using the post-summary design:

• Many various places in Teams and Collectives
• Review queue tasks
• New user activity screens, such as bookmarks and questions

Why we’re making these changes

Our current designs have withstood the test of time, but they fall short in many areas:

1. We generally assume 3 items of metadata: score, answers, and views. If we want to add new entries for e.g. bookmarks or revisions, it can be difficult to create a consistent layout in a list of questions.
2. Inconsistencies in implementation have led to several different layouts across the site. When gathering requirements for a unified post summary component, we found at least 5 (five!) different layouts.
3. Scaling the design is tricky, both in window size and adding features and functionality. We need to support all sorts of metadata on all sorts of devices.
4. Our post summaries were only designed to support questions (and answers, kinda). We need to be able to display various content types in single lists. For example, in a list of notifications, we may want to present an article next to a question.
5. We have no unified place to put an action menu.

Our new post-summary design solves these problems while supporting future features we’re exploring. Some features we’re looking forward to are:

1. An arbitrary, scalable number of stats
2. Multiple different content types
3. A consistent location for post actions
4. Scalable excerpts
5. Responsive layouts
6. A single consistent layout regardless of what data is included

How this component was designed

An early version of this component first appeared in Stack Overflow for Teams in a feature called For You. For You is a rich list of notifications that include questions, answers, and articles.

The existing designs were desirable for familiarity, but just weren’t well suited for the task. After the initial proposal and some iterations with our team of designers, the new post summary design was ready for user testing.

User testing was run with ~170 recently active users against 5 different versions of the post summary design (two of those being existing designs). The chosen design performed better than the existing designs in some metrics (including readability) and never worse on the remaining metrics (including familiarity, data absorption).

After this new design tested well, the design systems team gathered further requirements from across the organization and built it out as an official Stacks component. If you’re technically inclined, you can see some of the iterations in various open source pull requests.

If you’re familiar with the design tool Figma, feel free to check out some explorations prior to us moving into code.

FAQ

Q: What if I find a bug/regression?
A: Report it as an answer to this post - one bug per answer please. If you’re feeling charitable, add a [tag:bug] tag to the top of your post so we can more easily find it.

Q: What if I have constructive feedback, but it isn’t a bug?
A: We’d like to hear it! Add it as an answer on this post. As above, you can add a [tag:discussion] tag to the top of the post as well.

Q: When will FAVORITE_SCREEN be migrated to use this new design?
A: 6-8 weeks

Answer 1

After exploring a number of alternatives and discussing with multiple members of the CM team, we’ve decided that it would not be in the long-term interests of the network to roll these changes back. This includes both rolling back the code entirely and a "visual rollback" where we keep the new code, but shoehorn the old layout onto it.

Why?

One of Stacks's goals is to burn down technical debt in the complex Stack Overflow Codebase because the way it constructs pages for viewers can be excessively difficult to manage and change. Over the years, many highly-desired feature requests have gone unanswered specifically because the work burden associated with UI and UX changes is high, and it is difficult to budget in even apparently small changes.

Our evaluation alongside the CM team is that the changes Stacks introduces into the inner workings of the network are necessary at some point or another for the sake of the longevity of the community. We recognize the community is a bit burnt out from the feeling that this feedback isn’t going heard or addressed, and may consider the Stacks team's approach a step backwards in UI/UX. Keep these feature requests coming - they will soon be much more actionable.

Here are a few of the things we gain by keeping the new layout that aren't possible to cleanly do if we rolled back the design:

• Responsiveness - this was the primary catalyst for the change. The old layout was unusable on mobile and could not be feasibly scaled to work.
• Unified feature set - we had 5+ different layout implementations (plus the "QuestionMini" layout replaced here). That number has grown since writing the original post. Only some screens support some features¹, but not others and other screens exhibit bugs that have been fixed in visually related areas².
• Multiple types - we need a way to showcase multiple types of content in one list. The home page shows questions and apps (but not articles³). The question list shows questions and articles (but not apps⁴). Search results return questions, answers⁵ and articles. For You in Teams (an in box of rich notifications) shows questions, answers, articles, collections and a few other types of content. The existing design does not scale all of these scenarios. The Stacks post summary does.
• Extensibility - we want to be able to add new features to post summaries. In fact, many of these "new" features already exist in specific areas and can be (visually) supported everywhere if we are able to implement the backend processes. Existing features include: Collective post/user endorsements, Article types and read time in Teams / Collectives, Bookmark support in Activity, answers nested under questions in Activity (and Enterprise search results).

What have we done to address the community's concerns?

I've gone through nearly 100% of the feedback in the answers (as of 2022-01-27) and distilled it down to the major themes. Here are the top 5 themes, with the list roughly ordered by number of times the individual theme was mentioned⁶. The amount of trailing whitespace was the most mentioned issue, while the layout of the "stats" area was the largest combined category of related issues.

LEGEND

• ✅ Resolved
• ⚠️ Partially resolved
• ❌ Unresolved

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• ⚠️ Too much trailing whitespace
  • Category: Whitespace
  • Improvements made: Removed watched/ignored labels⁷
  • Further work: Fix the bounty indicator increasing space on the left side, explore adding body excerpt to home page⁸, explore improving wrapping of title/tags/user card
• ⚠️ Increase votes visibility / emphasize votes
  • Category: Stats
  • Improvements made: Moved votes to the topmost (leftmost on mobile) stat, increased visual contrast of votes stat, increased size of stats as a whole, removed visually distracting "supernova" icon from views
  • Further work: Needs discovery / additional user research to identify further specific pain points
• ✅ Don’t like the watched/ignored labels (adds height, too visually distracting)
  • Category: Whitespace, Stats
  • Improvements made: Removed labels entirely, reverted back to highlighting summary background, added icon to watched/ignored tags
  • Further work: Improve UX to better explain why the summary is highlighted/dimmed⁹, improve visuals in dark/high contrast mode¹⁰
• ❌ Quickly scan by votes (stats horizontally lined up)
  • Category: Stats
  • Improvements made: See above regarding votes visibility
  • Further work: Explore setting home layout to "minimal" always¹¹, Do discovery / additional user research on other layouts that provide similar benefits, but still allow for forward progress
• ✅ Stats text too small
  • Category: Stats
  • Improvements made: Stat sizes bumped across the board¹²
  • Further work: Needs discovery / further user research to identify further specific pain points

So, where do we go from here and what are our next steps?

We're committed to continual improvements on the design. This includes all of the explorations and commitments I've outlined in the previous section.

We're going to continue to roll out this design to the screens it already most resembles. This includes /questions, tagged questions and search results. The largest unresolved issue (see above) does not apply to these screens, as they have always had their stats laid out vertically like in the new design.

Additionally, we're going to continue to roll this specific implementation out to the different areas that already use the new design, so they can benefit from the bug fixes and added features.

We will continue monitoring this post for incoming, future bug reports / feature requests.

I know this message will not be well received by a number of users, but we sincerely thank you for your continued feedback.

Footnotes

¹ Here's a recent comment from a prolific user about the long standing search results page not implementing functionality seen everywhere else across the site

² This user edited their post to reflect that a bug fixed in this set of layout changes isn't working everywhere you'd expect, despite the layout being 100% visually the same

³ This is due to these items not being able to be made to fit the existing layout, which requires exactly three statistics, no more and no less.

⁴ These are shown, but using the question layout with the rest of the posts. Because of this, apps can not be quickly identified in any appreciable way.

⁵ The existing search results literally only differentiate answers by showing an A: in front of the title. Articles are implemented as an entirely different partial on questions.

⁶ I didn't order my list based on upvotes, as many highly upvoted posts included 2 or more different themes. I did notice that there is a pretty strong correlation between "combined number of upvotes" and "number of times mentioned".

⁷ Watched/ignored labels along with bounty indicators are the cause for additional trailing whitespace 95% of the time.

⁸ The home/recent question pages have never had a body excerpt, while almost every other post summary does (see "QuestionSummary" screenshot in the original question taken from /questions). Adding a body excerpt will further unify the implementations visually, potentially at the expense of list "scannability".

⁹ This was the primary reason for the inclusion of the labels. User research showed that non-power users often weren't sure why posts were suddenly bright yellow / dimmed.

¹⁰ Using color only to indicate state ranges from "not useful" to "actively harmful" for accessibility reasons (e.g. high contrast, color blind).

¹¹ Basically, force the mobile layout for desktop. Stats are horizontally aligned like before, but are placed above the title. This improves "scannability" at the expense of vertical height.

¹² Stat sizes are not quite as large as they were previously (~25% size reduction). Further increasing the size is at the expense of vertical whitespace, which was the largest single criticism.

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This update has been carefully written by Ben Kelly and reviewed by the CM Team. I'm posting it so we can pin the accepted answer.

Answer 2

feature-request

I cared about question scores, but now my head hurts.

On the previous layout, I could quickly survey the question scores by reading down the votes column:

Now, I simply cannot quickly survey the front page for question scores, as those scores are quite small and buried between other information:

To me, this is a complete loss of functionality of scores on the front page. Trying to read the scores on the page, quite literally, makes my eyes and head hurt.

So I guess I can word this as a feature-request: please change it back.

Answer 3

feature-request

Revert this

As critical feedback goes this is probably the sharpest I've delivered, but this change is neither needed nor warranted. It doesn't make me enjoy using the site on desktop, which is what I do during the course of my day.

It strains my eyes a bit to have to read the smaller text of the title, compared with the even smaller text of the other information I'm not sure I need to know in the moment.

Revert this, and revisit this. This UX is not good.

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In response to the third update - they're not going to revert this. So I'm burnt to a whole crisp on this. This is yet another case in which the company has decided to introduce an intrusive change that they insist is for the benefit of the community, but those benefits won't be realized for a long while. Like, I get it - it's innocent in and of itself, and paying tech debt is something I make a living out of these days - but this whole sentiment of "we'll fix it later, promise" is so played out that I can't take the company seriously anymore.

I should just stop giving feedback. You're going to do whatever you please and we're powerless to do anything about it. Just make the changes and post them to your blog and that'd be a better experience than having the modicum of hope that is you posting something on Meta about this.

Don't give me the "incremental changes" as something to indicate that you're listening to our feedback. We use this site every day. We liked the way it looked. You thrust this change on the entire damn network after talking with a handful of people about some obscure page that I think I've seen maybe twice in the ten years I've used the site, and decided to pick that as the standard for all posts.

Why did I even bother...

Answer 4

discussion

Ridiculous amounts of vertical white space on watched and/or bountied questions.

The old design had no problem fitting all of that information in the same vertical space as the title and tags, so this feels like a huge step backwards in that regard.

This could at least be partly mitigated by simply reverting to how questions with watched tags used to work (i.e. the colored background).

Answer 5

discussion

tl;dr: Please don't do this to question lists; the motivation is invalid.

We’re starting a rollout of the new post summary design

Please stop the rollout - on question list pages anyway; the new design for question lists is worse than the existing one.

Our current designs ... fall short ... :

• We generally assume 3 items of metadata: score, answers, and views. If we want to add new entries for e.g. bookmarks or revisions, it can be difficult to create a consistent layout in a list of questions.

And difficult it should be. It is tempting to "stuff" more meta-data into the question list, but there are diminishing returns. It would make more sense to have an alternative question list view with more meta-data, used when someone indicates that they want that meta-data.

• Inconsistencies in implementation have led to several different layouts across the SE network. When gathering requirements for a unified post summary component, we found at least 5 (five!) different layouts.

That's orthogonal to changing the basic design of question lists, which is mostly (or fully?) uniform across the site. If that design needs to be changed, explain why, then change it; if it doesn't - address whatever inconsistencies you find.

• Scaling the design is tricky, both in window size and adding features and functionality. We need to support all sorts of metadata on all sorts of devices.

I don't see what's tricky; and that challenge has already been met for many years. Also, you should not aim for a question list packed with a bunch more data and features.

• Our post summaries were only designed to support questions (and answers, kinda).

I don't know what post summaries are, I'm referring to the question list design. If you mean question titles, then - yes, StackExchange is a network of Q&A sites. Are you saying you intend to change this? For existing sites even? I hope not...

• We need to be able to display various content types in single lists.

No you don't. Or rather, not in the question list. The question list needs to display questions and a bit of meta-data about them, and it has done so reasonably well.

• For example, in a list of notifications, we may want to present an article next to a question.

Please don't force the design of a list of notifications on the list of questions.

• Our new post-summary design solves these problems while supporting future features we’re exploring.

As I've explained above, you have not presented problems with the question list design. So, the new design solves problems which may exist for other lists/pages, not the question list. That's a poor reason for changing the question list design.

Some features we’re looking forward to are:

It's nice that you're working on some generic item-summary-list design, but don't work on it at the expense of the acceptable/good design for question lists we have had so far.

Answer 6

feature-request status-completed

It is very hard to ignore my ignored questions.

Could you come up with something more subtle than an ostentatious black box leading the way, such as the post highlighting/greying we used before that worked perfectly fine?

If I have my ignored tags set up to still be visible on the page, ignoring should make the post less imposing (like the old greying out did), not more imposing by adding an eyesore of a black box.

That said, after some experimentation I prefer the black ignored tag to the gross yellow watched tag for watching tags, so I’ve ignored my watched tags for now.

Answer 7

discussion status-deferred

It's an old bug, but might be worth revisiting: the wording votes is wrong, it should be score.

The number that is displayed is not the number of votes on a post, but rather the score derived from number of upvotes and number of downvotes. Controversial posts can have a huge number of votes but still a score around 0.

If some countable noun is desired, maybe "net votes"?

Answer 8

bug status-bydesign

Wow, no text summaries for the questions anymore?

Frankly, this is the most awful change I've ever seen on Stack Overflow. There's no other way to put it. It makes it very difficult to browse now.

This has to be a bug, right?

Update: See comments below from Ben and Catija. You can get the old view by using the "Questions" link on the left nav.

Answer 9

bug status-completed

This design just hit live for the main page of Meta SE (this page, for clarity) and I've noticed that we've lost a pretty useful bit - The most recent activity notation next to the question listing.

When a post receives a modification (an edit, reopening, etc.) it "bumps" that post on the front page, and will display a "modified" notation along with the user (or Community if it was a deleted user/bumped by Community) who modified the post. That "modified" notation is clickable, and will take you to the post (answer or question) within that entry that was modified.

Here's what that looked like:

That link was profoundly useful when navigating to an answer that was modified on a question with many answers (multiple pages of answers), and it feels like an oversight that it's no longer available. It allowed a user to at-a-glance see who changed the post, and be able to quickly click the link to see what was changed.

For an example, I've just bumped this question with this answer, and the home page only indicates the date that this question was asked:

Which leaves the question of why this post was bumped unclear.

Could we restore that functionality?

Answer 10

discussion status-bydesign

It appears that the view count is now more important than the vote count. Previously, score and answer count were larger numbers, with a font size equivalent to that of the question title.

Maybe this impression is just caused from greatest hits being, well, greatest hits by view count and thereby all questions in that list having the 🔥 "supernova" icon, but the orange highlight makes it stand out too much. Should a similar emphasis be put on questions with >10, >100 or >1000 votes?

Answer 11

discussion

Why we’re making these changes

Our current designs have withstood the test of time, but they fall short in many areas:

May I humbly propose that the reasons for these changes are not actually good reasons in the first place?

1. We generally assume 3 items of metadata: score, answers, and views. If we want to add new entries for e.g. bookmarks or revisions, it can be difficult to create a consistent layout in a list of questions.

I've highlighted this part to point out that the difficulty you're talking about is a difficulty for you, the UI designer. The goal of UI design is surely to make things easier for the user; making things easier for the designer is important insofar as it makes it easier to make things easier for the user, it normally should not come at the cost of making things harder for the user.

2. Inconsistencies in implementation have led to several different layouts across the site. When gathering requirements for a unified post summary component, we found at least 5 (five!) different layouts.

Lists of questions can appear differently on different pages because those pages have different purposes. You found 5 different layouts because they were designed for 5 different use-cases. It is a deoptimisation to attempt to unify them.

If I'm browsing a list of recent questions then the most important information to me is the question score (particularly whether it's positive or negative) and the tags; if I'm browsing search results for a problem I have, the most important information to me is an excerpt of the post's content. But in the list of recent questions, an excerpt is not information I am going to use to decide whether to click on a post, and in a list of search results, the tags are secondary because they don't tell me whether a post is specifically about exactly the same problem as I have.

3. Scaling the design is tricky, both in window size and adding features and functionality. We need to support all sorts of metadata on all sorts of devices.

It doesn't really matter to me as an end-user if the page I'm looking at would look nice in a different sized window or on a different sized screen than the one I'm reading it on. Different layouts might be optimal for different devices, so again it is a deoptimisation to attempt to completely unify the design across devices.

4. Our post summaries were only designed to support questions (and answers, kinda). We need to be able to display various content types in single lists. For example, in a list of notifications, we may want to present an article next to a question.

See #2. If you're showing a list of questions on the home page then it is irrelevant whether an article could be shown uniformly alongside those questions, because articles don't appear on that page anyway.

5. We have no unified place to put an action menu.

See #2. What's missing from this list of five reasons is any real problem users had with the old UI, or any use case that a user might have such that a redesign would serve that user better. These five reasons are all focused on things which matter to the designer, not to the user.

As a user, I do respect the fact that making things easier for the people who develop and design the products I use is ultimately something which serves me, and asking a designer to choose a design which is better for me but harder for them to maintain means I am asking them to put effort in on my behalf.

But I still think it is worth highlighting that the interests of actual users apparently didn't form part of the rationale for the change, because I doubt you wanted to ignore the interests of actual users, I think it's more likely that you didn't realise you were doing so.

Answer 12

bug status-completed

The questions on the main page are missing the highlight if they have a watched tag on them. Previously this allowed me to quickly scan whether the question comes from one of my favourite tags, now they're all just bland white.

Answer 13

feature-request status-completed

Please restore background highlight on watched questions

The questions with your watched tags used to have a yellow background.

Now they instead have a yellow plaque on the left:

Which, at least for me, makes it much harder to visually scan for watched questions. Please consider restoring the background highlight we had before (with or without this new plaque).

Answer 14

discussion duplicate

This Watched label.

1. The color is like it belongs somewhere else, not to this page

2. It takes too much space.

3. There is no explanation of what it is for. I can only guess.

If it's for watching tags, I do not understand why it's so big. I guess people know which tags they are watching without showing them this huge icon. For usability, tags filters would be a better option. On my page almost all questions have this tag, I don't think that people who follow tags with big amount of questions need to see this label.

Answer 15

discussion

This change is bad, you need to step back and examine the purpose of the pages and elements you changed here. There are fundamental problems here, the new frontpage is much less usable than the old one.

The new layout for the votes/answers/views is inherently problematic. This is information that must be easily scannable when quickly looking through a list of questions, and not all numbers here are equally important. The old homepage view is really optimized for fast scanning of this table, with the three separate columns for the numbers.

The old questions view has a somewhat similar layout in that the numbers are also vertically stacked, but the huge difference is that the numbers are larger than the text and that the view count is much smaller. This makes an enormous difference, the different shapes provides a lot of help when scanning for these numbers. It's not an ideal design, the score and answers are a bit too similar when there are zero answers as there is no difference in color, but it still works pretty well.

Another huge difference is that in both old designs, I can see the score in my peripheral vision even while reading the title. I suspect this might even be the biggest factor that makes the new design so terrible for me in actual use. I don't need to stop reading the title to read the score. In the new design the score is too small and too similar to the other numbers for this, I need to stop reading the title and focus on the score to read it.

Answer 16

discussion

The new layout allows users on desktops to see fewer questions per screen on the hompage (due to the two sidebars on the page), which is undesirable.

While the new design may be more performant when switching smoothly to a mobile layout (which I support), it breaks what was a good layout in terms of information density on the desktop.

The lower information density (questions per screen in particular), makes my primary way of interacting with the network a much worse experience.

I should point out, that "screen" in this answer refers to what is visible and displayed on on my computer monitor, without having to scroll, as opposed to the word used in the question, which refers to different site views as screens.

As you can see from the below screenshots:

• In the new view, without those tags, I can see 10 questions at once
• In the old view I can see 12 questions at once

Compared to the original new view, without those tags, the old view enabled me to see 20% more questions.

Furthermore, not only is it easier to line up who posted, but also compare statistics between questions in the old view than the current view. If I try to scan down the list of recent posters, my eyes have to move all over the screen to find the information per question.

New view (original presentation):

Old view (captured using the waybackmachine):

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Post 2022-01-27 update

I've moved the comments around the watched/ignored tags down here, so as not to conflate them with the actual issue that this post of raising, which is far too much whitespace in the design as a whole.

As you can see from the below screenshot:

• In the new view, with the watched and ignored tags, I can see 9 questions

So, compared to the current new view, with the watched & ignored tags, the old view enabled me to see 33% more questions per computer monitor screen.

New View (post- addition of watched & ignored tags):

Answer 17

discussion

Why was such a major change to the interface of the main page of both Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network rolled out so quickly and with so little feedback gathered?

There is a reason why sites on the internet contemplating sweeping changes to their primary view offer users:

• Several months (or years in some cases) to transition between the two and gather feedback
• They do this by using a modal box on the page informing users that a change is going to happen, and would they like to preview it.

This sweeping change was buried in a post, that doesn't have an especially informative title, nor is it clear that it was referring to such a sweeping change (I missed it and I'm active on the SE network daily).

What's more it was only tested by ~170 users, on a page no-one uses (in comparative terms given the userbase of the site) over a very short period of time. I would have expected such a large change to the user experience to need much more data to be gathered from as wide a range of users as possible, with users beng able to compare both the new and old interfaces side-by-side (by changing a cookie setting set by the aformentioned model popup method that most sites use).

For a site with the userbase of Stack Overflow, let alone the Stack Exchange network as a whole, this approach to rolling out primary user interface design changes seems ill-conceived and irresponsible at best.

Answer 18

bugaccessibilitystatus-review

For questions without accepted answers, the "[X] answers" text is too hard to read, as the contrast ratio is too low

The text as to how many answers there are on a question is too light and difficult for me to read:

A quick check with a contrast ratio checker shows that it's only 2.97:1. It should be at least 4.5:1 to comply with the Level AA standards for normal text, and preferably higher as the text is now smaller than normal.

This prior answer only talks about text size and not text colors.

Answer 19

feature-request status-review

When going over the main pages, I find the amounts of votes, answers and views very important to quickly glean a lot of information about traffic, what questions might need more attention, &c. These amounts used to be very visible because these numbers were rendered in much larger font sizes.
Currently, the words as well as the numbers are even smaller than the text on both of the sidebars:

This is a strange change in the visual hierarchy and visually less appealing (to me).

Can the font-size of the 'post summary stats', i.e. Answers/Score/Views block (div class "s-post-summary--stats", currently at 12px) be changed to at least the default font size (of 13px)?

Answer 20

bug mathjax status-planned

I'm seeing a strange Mathjax layout problem on Stats.SE:

This display weirdness is not caused by the user's Mathjax input, as you can see from the post itself: PDF of $x_1^2+x_2^2-x_3^2-x_4^2$ with $x_i \sim N(\mu_i,1)$

I'm using Chrome 97.0.4692.71 for ARM on MacOS 12.1 (Monterey).

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It appears that this issue is more frequent on Math.SE. Some examples:

• Multiline MathJax on title
• Displays on main question page

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Update 2021-01-28: SE CMs have added the "status completed" tag, but there are some pages where this bug still persists. Here's an example from the "All actions" tab of a user profile. For this reason, I've removed the "status completed" tag.

I've created a separate question to report the bug in other pages. MathJax layout problems persist in "All actions" tab and review queues

Answer 21

(New answer, following the 2022-01-25 update)

We're currently gathering together all the discussion and feature-request feedback items to decide how we want to alter the design.

Sure, but in the meantime, please revert the question list to the old design.

Answer 22

bug status-completed

Date and time shown on homepage is the date the question was originally asked, not the time of the last activity as before

Previously, the date and time shown on the homepage for each question was the time of the last activity (originally being asked, a new answer posted, an edit made, Community user bump, question getting reopened, etc.).

Now, however, the date and time shown is always the one when it was originally asked, and not that of the last activity:

The "Active" sort order still works, though.

Can this please be changed back to what it originally showed?

Answer 23

discussionstatus-review

Update 2 - Watched tags color

After update 2, the watched tags got a new color + icon.

Since the shade of orange is very bright, and not used anywhere else, the tag's instantly draws my attention.

The yellow background is, in my opinion, more than enough. I've pressed the 'watch tag' button myself, no need to remind me about that causing annoying side effects such as:

• Content jumping
• Disturbing bright colours

Answer 24

bug status-deferred

Not a new bug, but let me mention it here anyway for the record: the question summaries may get truncated at random places, including in the middle of MathJax expressions, resulting in broken markup:

Answer 25

feature-requeststatus-review

As of Update 2, watched tags are now by far the most eye catching thing on the homepage feed when in dark mode:

Could we have a less vivid colour for these watched tags when using the dark theme?

Answer 26

feature-requeststatus-completed

It is unnecessary to know if people watch the questions - it should just be shown within the question, not on the homepage of the site's screen.

Why is it not helpful?

• This is unhelpful because most users are interested in the question itself - not whether someone watched it or not.

• It makes each question take up a lot of space, which makes it harder for visitors of the site to access more questions they may have missed.

  (See here:)

  

• Most of the time, the quality of the question can be discerned based on the vote count -- not if someone watches it, and most people will only click on the questions that interest them anyway.

What purpose does stating the presence of watchers have?

I really have no idea, other than to take up space and add a yellow icon to the regular interface.

Can Stack Exchange please take out the watch icon -- or at least give an option to not see it? (As a whole, I am not a fan of the new update and format, but the watchers haven't been brought up yet (at least I didn't see an answer about them) and feel like they should be recognized for what they are: an icon that symbolizes next to nothing.)

Update 12/2022: Thank you for fixing this. The design looks much cleaner without the coloured backgrounds in my opinion.

Answer 27

discussion

I would like to make and argument for presenting the score, view count, and answer count as in the previous layout.

Previously these three numbers are tabulated and treated as primary information side by side with "content data" such as the title and tags. Now they are presented in a nested list, which groups them and subsumes this list to the stuff about the content of the post, creating a two-level structure of information, and thus forcing users to retrieve the information in two steps.

However this is not how these numerical data are used. They have been playing a much more primary role in a user's decision to view a question or not, allowing users to skim the question list as a table and make quick judgments, which seems to be precisely the use case that this answer remarks upon. Thus I believe the score and answer count have an importance closer to the title than the tags or the most recent activity, and consequently deserve the more prominent position they had in the older design.

Answer 28

bug status-completed

My ignored tags are showing up now

I ignore the [dnd-5e] tag on Role-playing Games Stack Exchange. D&D 5th Edition is probably most of the site now. I want to be able to focus on questions that aren't about it, which the old view let me do. What's the point of ignored tags, otherwise?

Only one of the questions below would be plainly visible, and the rest faded out, in the previous view, the question tagged [pathfinder-1e].

Answer 29

support bug status-completed

What's the difference between the "Watched" badge without an eye and the one with an eye?

Also (not shown in screenshots below), "Ignored" without an eye, and with an eye with a line through it.

Both screenshots were taken in the same page load at the same time, so scrolling down I could see both (indeed, I can see all four mentioned on the same page), which implies they're different.

For reference here is a screenshot of all four on the page at once (screenshot from phone, set to show desktop version so I could fit them all).

Answer 30

feature-requeststatus-review

Yellow tag buttons clutter my view with information with non important screams of attention.

I'd rather prefer the font being bold with the same background as other tags, with a slight color background on the row, to know which tag is affected.

There is already so much information, don't draw my eyes unnecessarily hard towards relevant but unimportant info.

Current styling

Better styling

.tags .post-tag.s-tag__watched {
    font-weight: 600;
    padding-left: 0.5em;
    color: var(--theme-tag-color);
    background-color: var(--theme-tag-background-color);
}
.tags .post-tag.s-tag__watched:before {
    content:revert;
    display:none;
}

.subcommunity-avatar.s-avatar {
   filter: grayscale(1);
}
.subcommunity-google-cloud.s-avatar,
.subcommunity-go.s-avatar {
    filter: invert(1) grayscale(1);
}
body {
    --theme-link-color: #ddd !important;
    --theme-link-color-hover: #ccc !important;
    --theme-link-color-visited: #bbb !important;
}
.s-post-summary--stats-item.is-watched {
    display:none !important;
}
.s-post-summary__watched {
    background-color: var(--black-025);
}
.s-post-summary--stats {
  display: grid !important;
  width: unset !important;
  grid-template-areas:
    "score answers views"
    ". bounty ."
    !important;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(2, 1fr)!important; /* change to 3 for views */
  column-gap: var(--s-post-summary-stats-gap)!important;
  row-gap: var(--s-post-summary-stats-gap)!important;
  align-content: start!important;
  align-items: center!important;
}

.s-post-summary--stats .s-post-summary--stats-item,
.s-post-summary--stats .s-post-summary--stats-item.has-answers {
  white-space: normal!important;
  text-align: center!important;
  margin: 0!important;
  padding: 4px!important;
  width: 60px!important;
  word-spacing: 60px!important;
}

.s-post-summary--stats-item[title$="views"] {
  grid-area: views!important;
}

.s-post-summary--stats-item.has-bounty {
  grid-area: bounty!important;
}

/** Hide unwanted elements **/
.s-post-summary--stats .s-post-summary--stats-item[title$="views"],
.s-post-summary--stats .s-post-summary--stats-item.is-watched,
.s-post-summary--stats .s-post-summary--stats-item.is-ignored,
.s-post-summary--stats .s-post-summary--stats-item.has-accepted-answer .iconCheckmarkSm {
  display: none!important;
}

.tags .post-tag.s-tag__watched {
    font-weight:600;
    padding-left: 0.5em;
    color: var(--theme-tag-color);
    background-color: var(--theme-tag-background-color);
}
.tags .post-tag.s-tag__watched:before {
    content:revert;
    display:none;
}

Ideal styling(in my opinion)