Please don't repeat such an intrusive "full design" April's Fools in the years to come

Question

TL,DR: this year's April's fools could be a source of confusion, or worse, in certain workplaces. Please stick to less intrusive stuff.

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Very related: Why was the decision made to make the 2019 April Fool's joke immediately activate?, but this asks about the "why", and is not a feature request to simply have less of an intrusive design for next April's Fools.

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Long story short, from what I gather of previous April's Fools, there was a duck, chat with an expert, overall rather discreet stuff, with the exception of Cornify (but that was 10 years ago, and SO wasn't as "big" and commonly used than today, was it?).

Emphasis on the "rather discreet", because while one can like or dislike that 90s glittery, flashy, background-repeating design, it occured to me that fortunately it's Sunday (here), and that stuff didn't pop in my office where my boss could have seen it. I knew straight away it was an April's Fools because I know SE, you know it and I know it, but my coworkers might not, and explaining will probably be more awkward than anything else.

Some workplaces are just not going to be okay with their employees browsing what looks like a 90s silly blog. Let's just not take that risk, a rubber duck is just fine...

Obviously, as said above this issue stems from the joke being enabled by default, and I do understand that making it opt-in would ruin the feel.

Answer 1

If a joke on a site used by professionals is taken so far that it slow down or obstructs ordinary usage of the site, going that far should be opt-in. Regarding this:

I do understand that making it opt-in would ruin the feel

Changing the entire site to a barely-usable 90s-style design could have been opt-in, without spoiling the joke.

Have an opt-in notice like the opt-out notice pointing at the clock icon, but have the content of that opt-in message in full-on 1990s-style, with comic sans, a red scrolling marquee saying CLICK HERE TO TRY OUR GREAT NEW DESIGN!!!!!!!!, animated flame gifs around a blue underlined "CLICK HERE" at the bottom... but only inside the box pointing at the button, until the user clicks on the button.

If it was done like that:

• People who weren't in a hurry would get the joke, laugh, click into 90s mode and have fun
• People who were in a hurry could just do the task they came to the site to do with no hassle
• The inevitable unexpected bugs (like load time slow down, cookie failure, site-specific CSS problems) would matter much, much less, because they'd only affect people who had opted in to a joke.

Answer 2

I agree we shouldn't do a reskin prank in the foreseeable future. Please see my retrospective for more background and especially the addendum. I thought it was a lot of fun, but there were unintended consequences. More importantly, the reason the event was fun for people was because it was unexpected. Doing something similar next year would carry the joke too far. (And for people who thought we went too far this year that's doubly true.)

You've probably seen homepage takeover ads. They seem especially common on gaming sites and they are simply awful. Unfortunately, they also work really well from an advertising and revenue generating perspective. I'm proud our company doesn't see those types of ads. It also makes good business sense for us since our value proposition is that our ads are more likely to be relevant to the people who see them. I suspect that some of the distaste people had with this stunt was influenced by bad experiences with overly aggressive ads on other sites. Fortunately, that's not who we are.

Answer 3

You can just turn it off for youself. Why not let the others to have fun?

I like this design by the way. It has some issues (like upvotes on comments) but in general it works fine. It doesn't spoil anything, it's clear and readable. And I'm not going to turn it off.