Our Design Vision for Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network

Question

For those who don’t know me, I’m the Director of Design at Stack Overflow. I’m responsible for the team of designers who work on the public sites.

The visuals of Stack Overflow and the network sites have remained largely unchanged since I joined Stack Exchange, Inc. in 2017. The aging design has become frustrating for me, for our designers, and for our audience. We all deeply care about the sites and want the visual aesthetics to reflect that, in addition to making the site(s) feel welcoming and less intimidating.

What is a design vision and why do you need one?

A design vision is intended to provide top level inspiration and guidance for the design team. It helps designers create a unified experience when working on different projects. With new features coming down the pipeline for both our community and Teams products, it is imperative for us to align on a visual direction. We can build new components in our existing design language, but we’d like to use this unique opportunity to evolve.

The design vision is not something that is written in stone and being shipped as is. This means that each designer will be able to work within their unique problem—taking research, user/community feedback, and other constraints into account.

Show us this vision, please

As you can see, there are inconsistencies, things we haven’t touched yet, and items pushed very far visually just for the sake of exploration. There is a lot that is different here: top navigation, sidebar widgets, post summary, and more—but the only things that are finalized right now are our colors and the items we’ve already shipped (like buttons). Nothing else is set. It is simply meant to portray a visual identity described by the team as simple, modern, efficient, and scalable.

How will you bring the design vision to life?

We are working on many things right now and simply don’t have the capacity to go heads down into a redesign. You’ll see designers build new features in this style (e.g., Search) and you’ll also see designers pick up “components” (e.g., buttons). In short, things will be shipped iteratively and may feel disjointed from time to time. No matter how they ingest this design vision, we will be bringing major ideas to you with time to provide feedback, and we commit to reviewing that feedback carefully. If we believe a change is very minor and will not impact your workflow, we may make the change and discuss only if an issue arises. For instance, we may not bring every change that adjusts a border by 1px to the community in advance, but if we add a new section to the page, we’d bring that in advance.

So what’s next?

We have three designers eager to discuss specific components with you that they want to work on. They have now made individual meta posts regarding the left side navigation, user cards, and the post summary display. I want to reiterate that development has not started on these components. We are bringing you our thoughts early in hopes of gathering useful feedback based on your time spent on the sites that can influence the design.

I look forward to hearing from you all and building on, improving, and implementing our vision for Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network.

Answer 1

It looks to me like this is an effort towards reaching out to the community at an earlier stage for feedback, as has been insisted upon by many here on Meta and as part of the moderator/community strike. Whether it's a new effort or just something you planned all along, thanks and kudos!

As you can see, there are inconsistencies, things we haven’t touched yet, and items pushed very far visually just for the sake of exploration.

I'm not a design professional, and maybe this post isn't targeted to me, but I don't really know what any of these mean, and I certainly don't see them.

What would be most helpful to me in understanding what you're trying to do would be to explain these specifically to help me understand the vision that is being presented:

What is inconsistent?

What have you touched and what haven't you touched?

If there are aspects that look more like an older version of the site, is that because the intent is to revert those changes or is it just that the design was iteratively developed from an older site version and they've now drifted apart?

What does it mean to push an item visually for the sake of exploration, and which items are pushed that way?

The aging design has become frustrating for me, for our designers, and for our audience. We all deeply care about the sites and want the visual aesthetics to reflect that, in addition to making the site(s) feel welcoming and less intimidating.

What about it is frustrating, besides the age? Which visual aesthetics do you see as a problem, and why? Which aesthetics are unwelcoming or intimidating?

I'm certainly not expecting solutions out of the gate to everything, that can come in the future, but it would be more helpful to me in understanding the overall "vision" to hear what specifically you're going after and why.

Answer 2

I think what would help us care about this design vision more is if you justified what your frustrations were.

Speaking as an engineer, I value function over form. That's not to say that I don't think that form has no place, but I wouldn't sacrifice function for form, or make changes dedicated solely to form without some kind of reason.

You highlight:

The aging design has become frustrating for me, for our designers, and for our audience. We all deeply care about the sites and want the visual aesthetics to reflect that, in addition to making the site(s) feel welcoming and less intimidating.

In part:

1. The design is aging, sure. But this is something that I feel is highly subjective, and neither here nor there when it comes to the utility of a site. Hacker News hasn't had much in the way of "improvement" to its site or layout since inception, and it's still a very serviceable and usable site. One of my favorite game series - Pokemon - has in its fandom the venerable site Serebii.net, which is still stubbornly Web 1.0 as proclaimed by their webmaster, and while yes it's an ouchie to deal with on mobile, the site still functions. Why does the age of the design matter in your vision?

2. Who is the actual audience here - the people that use the site on a daily basis, helping with administrivia and getting people to their answers, or those fly-by agents who just copy and paste their code from the site to do their job? This needs to be defined precisely, and I make no joke of this - if the people who actually keep this site running and relevant can't use it anymore, then it doesn't really matter how pretty y'all want to make it.

3. What is the quantum leap you're making between welcomeness and design? This really needs to be spelled out with some data. We've made too many visual changes to say that "we're welcoming", but if we keep having to make visual changes to the site to say we're welcoming, it's not the visuals that are the issue.

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Maybe could I just borrow some of this energy on design to ensure that y'all focus on shipping a global dark mode instead? This is something that's actually been requested from up and down the stacks, and the company even created a whole new visual design library to try to accomplish that. Can y'all get this done first before you commit to whatever "vision" you're coming up with out of thin air, please??

Answer 3

What's going on with this section over here? At a first glance, it looks like all of the icons have been re-ordered for some reason, and the help button removed.

Why is it necessary to move these icons? What's the motivation behind shuffling the order?
The inbox and reputation dropdowns used to be on the left side of the topbar, but then when review became a dropdown icon and help became an icon instead of a word, the inbox and achievements dropdown were moved over there as well.

In this mockup, the moderator inbox has been moved to be with everything else instead of visually separate like it is now. (I also don't see where the flags count is.) This feels like a bad idea; I don't want the stuff in the mod inbox getting mixed up with my personal inbox.

Also, the reputation and inbox numbers appear to have been changed into a dot. Please, please, please do not remove the numbers here. It's simply removing useful information for no reason. The dot for notifications is how things works on Teams and it is so frustrating to not know how many items are unread there (along with my poor experience in general of how the inbox works in Teams). Please do not remove information that is currently being displayed.

Answer 4

What happened to Ask Question button?

I cannot believe I am going to say this, but where is the "Ask Question" button?

That people ask questions too soon is one thing, but that they cannot easily ask questions because you have hidden the button is something completely different.

Also the "Add Question" is extremely confusing terminology when you are looking at existing questions as it suggests that the question must somehow be connected with the one you are already looking at.

Only 5 questions on a page?

I truly hope this is just your proof of concept design, but only 5 questions on a page is an extremely low number. I am using 50 per page as a default.

When we are at question lists, your new design is extremely wasteful in vertical space. It is not suitable for fast browsing and inspecting a large number of questions.

The current design is fine, thank you!

I am saying that the current design is fine, but actually, it is not completely fine. It was fine before it was modified for mobile. And even then it was already ruined by some color changes.

Constant changes just for the sake of change just ruin the workflow for frequent users that need to adapt and find their way around again, and again, and again. And when you break something or ruin some functionality, you only fix it halfway and leave it until the next major redesign that makes it even worse.

I still cannot read numbers on reputation notifications because you have changed colors to too light green and made font thinner, several years ago.

Please fix the colors first. And don't change things that don't need to be changed.

And keep in mind that function is imperative, not the looks.

Answer 5

I am very apprehensive about the information density of the new design. Your image depicts a list of merely 5 questions at a screen height of 1540 px, while the current design permits 8, with 100vh = 1280px AND scaling at 125%.

Being able to browse through more questions with less scrolling is concretely positive towards finding interesting ones, which your new design clearly goes against. The addition of a question excerpt seems superfluous to me, as any argument that "it gives a glance of the question body" is countered by "this could - and should - be solved by educating users to write more meaningful and informational titles".

Answer 6

I appreciate you sharing the overall direction and vision with us. I'm married to an artist and I understand that it can be difficult to share things that are in progress and likely to change :)

I know I am a broken record about this, but please keep accessibility in mind. It is so much easier to create something beautiful and accessible if you plan for accessibility in advance. It's a lot harder to retrofit accessibility and maintain the aesthetic.

There is a community around accessibility in video games who are very willing to donate their time and expertise to help anyone interested in learning more about what sorts of design choices can end up being obstacles for some gamers. I'm not sure if the same type of community exists for web applications, but if it does it would be worth tapping into.

Answer 7

Put the stuff new users need to see where they'll see it

I'm really in desperate need of help because I look at Reddit and see that their basic rules are right there on the sidebar on every page above the fold (at least on desktop), no clicking through multiple menus trying to find some information that you know exists in one of those Help Center pages that haven't been updated in years because mods can't find them either. Reddit's design is far from perfect (I hate accordions without an "expand all" button), but it makes me self reflect. Where are our rules for what's supposed to be in questions and answers? Would you know if you didn't look it up just now? How is a new user supposed to know it exists and get there?

Quoting Jeff Atwood:

When it comes to user interface design, I'm no guru, but I do have one golden rule that I always try to follow:

Make the right thing easy to do and the wrong thing awkward to do.

Answer 8

I don't wish to sound repetitive, but it's important to recognize that you have a specialized sub-site with over 100,000 users, at least 1% of whom have significant experience in high-profile Fortune 50 companies. Specifically, I'm referring to UX Stack Exchange.

Rather than leveraging this valuable asset, it seems you continue to engage in time-consuming tasks that that take weeks or months when they could be resolved in a day and then yes, use time FOR TESTING. I don't say design isn't important (it is very important), but you need to confirm its effectivity by means of user testing, A/B or multivariate tests, work with ANOVAs, regressions, and other fundamental UX research methodologies. When I read your post and it's all about looks and basic web design, it's really frustrating.

I'm not sure how long you've been in this position, but historically, every redesign on SO has been a disaster requiring subsequent fixes. This is because basic UX principles are often ignored, principles like the ones I've mentioned above. Moreover, SO has a policy of not seeking the guidance of some of the most skilled professionals in the field, adhering to a philosophy of taking without giving back.

While I'm aware that SO might disregard my concerns, I still feel compelled to ask for essential accessibility, proper testing (and no, asking here is NOT testing!), and a touch of common sense. I'm uncertain if you'll heed my advice (based on history, you likely won't), but I need to voice my thoughts for my peace of mind. At the very least, I know I've done what I could.

PS: what vision? you didn't even mention it!

Answer 9

I think four things need to be said:

• If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

  Please don't make change for change's sake. It's worrying that you think the design is aged. What has the age of the design got to do with its effectiveness or usability? YouTube forced changes on users some time ago and they were not an improvement in any practical way. One of the worst changes was taking up more screen space per video preview, and it seems like you're doing a similar thing here. Also keep in mind that the people who complained about features were what proportion of users. Is the idea of change being driven by a noisy minority compared to a silent majority who want it left largely unchanged? Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• Dark Theme first.

  This would seem to be the most significant change that most users would actually want. It's a demand that users of many, many sites on the Internet want and it seems to be the last thing people get. Let's try this first. And that's dark theme as one option, not the only option, please.

• Small changes can make a big difference.

  It's worrying when people talk about redesigning a site's appearance because the fear is that this means completely altering the design rather than making important but small changes. Often, far more often than not I would say, it's small changes that make a huge difference. I'd suggest trying to identify the small changes that are needed rather than trying to completely alter the appearance.

• A mobile-specific UI.

  Yes, I know you dropped the mobile app a while ago, but a version of the site with a mobile-friendly (and streamlined) UI would seem a more useful long-term investment than a redesign of the desktop format. Leave the desktop format alone and expend effort on a mobile UI. If anything is "aged" about SE/SO it's this. Notably visiting a specific sub-site has a reasonably usable UI (which could possibly be improved), but visiting SE's home page produces the full desktop page squished into my phone's screen, making it very unfriendly to phone users.

Answer 10

IMHO there are other concrete things that could be improved before worrying about nebulous "Design Visions".

Here's one example. I read SO on an iPad, when it is in portrait orientation, and I look at my own profile page, most of the real estate is wasted on "StackOverflow" and "Products" which I never click, and there's no room for the "Search" box:

This makes it a pain to check my own previous answers.

If I rotate my iPad to landscape mode, suddenly the "Search" box is the most important box in the world and gets half the screen:

Answer 11

A few quick thoughts - the help button is missing, and for a new user all those icons are cryptic. It's worth exploring how to ease someone with no SE experience into the broader network. I started off with a simple top bar with words. It was probably easier than what we have now, and I think there's a certain value in looking backwards as much as forwards for inspiration

There's also been an unfortunate trend of nibbling away at the horizontal space for content for advertising. SE does need to make money but I literally have only a third of my screen in use by SE. Considering larger viewports in responsive design would be appreciated too.

Also bring back the non sticky top bar please!

There's also a backlogged wishlist to consider - and specifically, if collectives can get space there, the other two constituents of most sites, meta and chat could earn a spot. It would be especially helpful for smaller sites.

Answer 12

Unfortunately I think this was one of the design team's less effective communications. I say that because there are a lot of comments by both design team members and community managers which amount to "wait, that's not what this is about!" Now that we're getting more of the specific design vision posts I think I'm getting a better idea at what this introductory post is for (it wasn't even clear originally that it was meant to be introductory in that way!) I'd like to suggest a few areas of constructive criticism, and it's not too late to edit the post to reduce future confusions.

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Firstly, I was quite disappointed that the post reads ableist. The main meat of the post is two screenshots followed by "As you can see..." I don't know if the design team is ultimately responsible for website accessibility, but it is surely intimately involved in implementing accessibility measures. The community have been asking for accessibility improvements for a long time. While I'm sure some of them are on the cards for the future, it is upsetting to see it overlooked here. I'm not visually impaired, but if I was I would've been insulted by how this post overlooked my needs.

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Next, you briefly explain what a design vision is, but you don't set forward what the team's design vision consists of. This is a great paragraph:

A design vision is intended to provide top level inspiration and guidance for the design team. It helps designers create a unified experience when working on different projects. With new features coming down the pipeline for both our community and Teams products, it is imperative for us to align on a visual direction. We can build new components in our existing design language, but we’d like to use this unique opportunity to evolve.

But instead of describing it (or even copying the text I assume the team has) you just show us the screenshots. While it may be clear to the team how the screenshots show the design vision, it's not to us. And I think that's why there's a lot of mismatch between the feedback community members have been giving, and what you were seemingly expecting.

• Is it just about "visual identity" as a later paragraph says?
• Does User Experience come under the design vision?
• Does the design vision have principles like accessibility-first or mobile-first?
• Does the design vision concern questions of optimising for the first time user vs the regular/power user vs mods, or is that out of scope?
• Do site customisations come under the design vision (for example, is there an intention to increase, decrease, or maintain the level of customisation offered to a site?)

All of these are things which could well come under the heading of a Design Vision, but we don't know if they come under the team's current design vision or not.

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Lastly, the purpose of this introductory post. It wasn't really clear that this post is just introductory, and that many future posts concerning specific areas of changes would be made. Yes you did mention future posts would be coming, but we didn't know what they'd look like.

My guess is that in this post you'd most appreciate general comments on the design vision itself, rather than raising particular pain points or detailed feedback on the screenshots. (As several staff comments have said, the screenshots are not meant to be ready for final comment, and have mistakes and incomplete things in them.)

I'd suggest you do this:

1. Set out a textual description of the design vision. Ideally just copying in the team's official design vision statement if there is one.
2. Remove the screenshots - at this time they're actually more of a hindrance. They don't seem to represent the final state you're moving towards, and are confusing the community about what changes you're thinking of making.
3. Explain in slightly more detail what feedback you'd like in this post, compared to the follow-on posts.

Answer 13

I am concerned about the community bulletins. These redesigns are taking up a lot of space and blend in to the point where I see the blog posts displayed very prominently and then the meta posts are overwhelmed with the sidebar add and another list of questions. The meta questions lose the distinct separation that currently exists. The bulletin is visually distinct from other items and noticeable.

My other concern is with the question list. It is very visually sparse. Your screenshot shows 5 questions before your scroll. The current page shows more than double that. Why add all that white space? On Stack Overflow 5 new questions will show briefly. According the stats provided at the WeAreDevelopers conference a new question is asked every 14 seconds.

In short - a lot of information is being spread out. I assume to make things less visually dense, but at the expense of hiding that information through either fewer questions on the list or by pushing down the meta posts the community is interested in for blog posts that are less relevant to site maintenance.

A few other questions:

• Are watched tags moving some place else? They don't appear in your current iteration.
• Are the "Recommended for you" and "Related questions" (current design) the same thing?
• What does the side bar look like with 8 items (like my screenshot above)?

Answer 14

Bring back the pre-2017 feature of showing the count of pending suggested edits in the top bar

Before the top bar received its current design in 2017, it formerly showed the number of pending suggested edits to users with the privilege to review suggested edits. However, the 2017 design changes saw this always-shown number being removed and replaced with an occasionally-shown alert dot. Immediately after the changes, there was a sudden increase in the amount of time it took for edits to be reviewed, and the queue began to pile on and reach its maximum size. I also noticed that the time it took for my suggested edits here on this site to be reviewed went up from 6-8 minutes to 6-8 hours after the new top bar was deployed here.

In response to the slowdown in suggested edit reviews, the team removed the site-specific override on SO to require three reviews to approve or reject instead of only two and increased the edit queue size from 200 to 500. However, while these band-aid fixes did stem the problem for a while, the fundamental issue of edits taking much longer to be reviewed still remains. Also, for about a year now, the number of pending edits has frequently reached the maximum of 500, preventing all site users from suggesting edits.

In response, I filed a feature request asking that the count of pending edits be reinstated. It was declined in February as doing so would require the top bar to be fully redesigned. However, as the top bar is being fully redesigned due to these changes, I hope it can now be reconsidered for implementation, if not permanently, as a temporary experiment to see if it undoes the slowdown.

Answer 15

In discussion elsewhere, it came up that, well, we're not designers.

What is a design vision in this context? I get that nothing is set in stone, and the deliverables are separated out by content - but as an end user, what do the images I see mean, and how do they reflect the final product?

What's meant to be communicated to me, and what's the value add, and my expected input at this stage of the design process?

Answer 16

the only things that are finalized right now are our colors and the items we’ve already shipped (like buttons)

(emphasis mine)

I find it troubling that one of the few changes that are apparently set in stone are buttons. The recent change to the styling of the voting buttons was found unhelpful by 685 people, helpful by only 127 users. Here is a recent question at Cross Validated:

Since the change, I have been needing to look twice or more often just to figure out whether I have already voted on a post or not.

Please increase the contrast on voting buttons again.

Answer 17

Dark theme and general accessibility of the network's sites is something that has been requested several times by the community over the years. Can you speak to how these will fit into this vision?

Is this vision somehow related to a desire to solve technical debt and move on from bad practices, like the overuse of !important? I would be interested in understanding if there are such technical motivations for the changes too, since for technical users to accept an interface refresh it is usually easier if it can be tied to making underlying code better, rather than just "the old design felt aged."

Answer 18

As this announcement is intended as a high-level, overview, of the current version of the vision, I'll focus on some high-level aspects.

Overall, part of the "vision" I am gathering is a shift to the "Modern" or, iirc, "Material" style of controls and layouts. Especially in the reduced "design" of the right-hand side nav-bar icons. Looking at the pages as a whole, I still see inconsistencies between "zones". Some are bordered, and other are not. Inside the zones, some have content divisions and some don't. For controls—nav-bar and left-hand side—I prefer to have the "target" area defined such that I know when my cursor is, or is not, in the "hot zone". This is a usability and accessibility issue as well. More so if the background changes color on mouse-enter, yet the "link" isn't activated unless the click is closer to the icon or text. The background changing on mouse-enter can help define the zone, and is not accessibility compliant. Success Criterion 1.4.1, a Level A requirement, prohibits using color alone to present meaningful content or instructions. It reads:

Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.

Play with the colors as much as you choose, but just remember to check contrast values and check for color blindness variations. And keep the ability for other "eyes", such as JAWS, Orca and the like to "interpret" the information correctly.

The second request: keep the id="" in HTML for sections unique (that is the "rule" in HTML after all), so that user content CSS can alter display attributes, such as display: none; for selected content. In a similar thread of thought, coordinate all, I mean literally every single instance, font-size settings. Use of the rem units would be a good basis. This allows users to scale up or down the font in either the full page, or targeted areas such as the Q&A content section. Users with less than ideal vision appreciate the ability to set the browser's default size and have well-behaved sites honor that. Users with massive displays (55-inch perhaps) might be better served with a smaller baseline font size.

The third request, and probably a "not gonna happen," but I have to ask. (You all can't say "yes" if I don't ask.) Make the excess data zones collapsible or removable. Nobody wants to see the "Advertisement" boxes (I don't think so anyway). I never want to see the "Popular Network Questions", "The Overflow Blog", "Recommended for you", and "Trending Questions" boxes. Except on two sites, I also don't want to see the "Featured on Meta" box. In the left panel, the Collectives and Teams sections are useless as well. I am not in, and never will be in, either of those projects. Aside from the advertisement zone, many users will have different opinions as to what they don't, or do, want to have. Give the option rather than forcing us to use CSS to "take out the trash."

The fourth request, which seems to have already been considered: test early and fail fast. Maybe even find users, excluding me for the record, willing to be early-alpha testers. Please pay attention to accessibility-oriented users if you do. Hopefully you can find users who are not only opinionated, as I'm sure we humans tend to be, but also able to give neutral feedback outside of their personal preferences. Perhaps, as an extra measure of external evaluation, get involved in the UX/UI design site on your own network. It might also be helpful to investigate the Graphics Design site. Either of both sites could serve as a place to get answers in general, on their subjects, as well as a potential source of early-alpha testers.

Lastly, unrelated to what the new vision is, rather how that vision is expressed, I wish to emphasize, or reiterate some of what has been said by others. Yes, please, give me a wall of text. Use the pictures if you wish, or need to, for clarification, but don't make them the "communication". A picture is worth 1000 words. A picture is also subject to 1000 interpretations. I visit enough of the sites other than Stack Overflow that I've adapted to several styles, themes, colors, and what-nots. I applaud the differentiation in sites, and would like to see more of them get a face-lift (if and when the team can spare a moment or two from the big 'vision'), but this also means that comparing the supplied screenshots with "memory" leaves me 90% clueless about why it "feels" different. (Incidentally it also feels worse, but I don't know the "target" either.) Perhaps as an older generation, I have a different view of things, but the (okay, unkind word) "cheesy" icons on the nav-bar feel less "inviting" than fully drawn graphics. Almost like the designer didn't have the time, or concern, to make "real" icons.

Just a final note, as a reminder. The sites which must now be rebuilt in line with the new "vision" are, to you, a job. Perhaps a project, or maybe even a passion (the best kind of job.) For us, as users, they are more like home. We don't just see the question list and the answer pages; we see all the dark corners, such as the edit pages, review pages, tag wiki's, etc., all the rest of what makes the sites "work". For drive-by search engine readers the two pages are enough. If SE wants to convert these search engine users into contributing users, they need to paint the restrooms as nice as the parlor.

Answer 19

Plan for enough time for bug fixes before making any changes

It is a consistent pattern for changes in SE that you will come up with some shiny new things, but once they get deployed, remaining problems often won't get fixed.

For example the new inbox was deployed just before the winter bash, the community members report a lot of problems only to get told that you currently don't have the bandwidth to fix the problem due to winter bash/holidays/whatever. Fast forward 6-8 months, there are still open problems.

For your design vision, please include enough follow-up time in your planning before you start working on things.

Answer 20

Will we also be looking into implementing long-standing feature requests related to the components that are being redesigned, or is this more of just a visual overhaul?

I do like the new /questions design, as it brings us back to a layout similar to what we had before, emphasizing what matters on the left and moving views below. Denoting "Hot Question" in the tag area is nice, would also be interesting to see other similar statuses there like "Protected" and maybe "Wiki", or "Official Post" on meta for company statements. Could these become too noisy once collective icons are shoved in?

I like the consistency of the components on the right, but noticed many of them have a menu icon. What's that about? Surely there's nothing we'd be able to "configure" there for ads, so that's probably a report button but for the blog? Featured on meta? Possibly a way to configure/filter things coming down the road?

Answer 21

Are there any plans to utilise more space on larger screens? On any screen larger than 1100px wide, there's just so much wasted space. There's plenty that could be done with it, for example;

• Widen questions, allowing more information to fit on one line and therefore show more questions on one page
• Failing that, show more columns - perhaps two columns of questions. Again, allowing for more questions on a single page.

The sites in general use a 3 column layout which feels very cramped/restricted. There's no reason for it to feel that cramped on 2k (2650px) or 4k screens (3840px), for example.

image included to show illustrate how much whitespace is wasted (on a 4k screen) - note that I have the left sidebar disabled in my settings.

Answer 22

please evolve functionality first

I believe in good design. Functional design. Beautiful design. But for obvious reasons, especially for a site like this, underlying functionality needs to come first, with visual design's role is to surface it, make it easy to grok and to use, and at its most ideal, make it a joy.

search and filtering need to get much better

It's hard to find answers:

• Which is bad for obvious reasons. But also:
• When a user doesn't find an answer easily, they'll ask a new question.
• This leads to lots of dupes and noise, making answers ever harder to find.
• It also sucks up moderator time.

It's hard to find questions:

• I hardly ask questions. I come to SO to help people. I often take a look, get overwhelmed, and then close SO, because it feels so unproductive having to sort through pages of questions that I can't answer or feel uninterested in answering.
• The current question filtering is useful, but it needs to be taken to another level. You'll get a lot more answers if people like me don't give up.

I have ideas, but they could be crap. But this is a large community, with a lot of brains. I'm sure there are golden ideas out there. Tap into it. Not just for feedback, but for innovation. This could take the form of a regular Meta question, e.g. "Does anybody have any great ideas on how to improve search and filtering".

But I have a better idea:

a Netflix-like Stack Overflow Challenge

For those of you unfamiliar: The Netflix Prize

What initially made Netflix's challenge such a big deal was the prize, $1,000,000. I'm sure that drove a lot of interest and spurred some people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered.

But the real innovation was Netflix releasing enough data that people could actually develop algorithms and measure them. If Stack Overflow could release enough data in an easy to consume format, I've no doubt that you'd get countless people who can't help but want to take a stab at coming up with new search and filtering algorithms.

This will be easier for SO than it was for Netflix, because you don't have to worry about anonymizing the data.

As to measurement, I'm sure we could some up with some way to do so (I don't know what kind of ancillary data SO has that might be used for this). Worst case the measurement would be subjective, or SO could test the best candidates using A/B testing.

Answer 23

I appreciate that the extra space is important to avoid overwhelming new users, but please allow for a compact view of the questions if we opt into. While it's only an extra line or two per question, but when you're scrolling through many questions, it adds up quickly. Here's a sidebyside quick draft of the space we're losing.

The right side is from the question's original preview image of the question list, and the left is a scrunched up part that minimizes space lost.

Looking forward to seeing what's coming next!

Answer 24

In my humble opinion, any redesign should have its primary focus on user experience, especially the ability to find useful answers. I don't really need SO or SE to be pretty.

Answer 25

The post-menu in the mockup only shows share, edit, and follow. What happened to the flag button?

(I still see the comment-flag-button, though.)

Answer 26

Why exactly is the filter-box from the homepage included between the question and answer? It doesn't really make sense for it to be there- is there a reason?

Answer 27

Will Watched Tags and Ignored Tags still be possible from right hand side? I use this as an easy shortcut all the time.

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Also, as others have said, please don't forget what we have already requested for dark mode.

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Please don't place an ad between a question's title and body

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User controls should not be between questions.

If this represents some form of pinning, please provide an opt-out facility.

Answer 28

Will Chat get a redesign as well? As a fairly active user of Chat on Code Golf Stack Exchange, I and other users often rely on userscripts and custom stylesheets to make Chat usable and decent looking. In my opinion, its current design is ancient and hard to use. I feel it's only right to include Chat as part of this vision.

I think this is something that people have asked for a lot in the past, but if you're going to be redesigning Stack Exchange, I would say that this is point in most dire need of a redesign. Not saying I speak for everybody, though.

Answer 29

The save icon in lists seems useful

I think I would use this a lot if it showed up in searches.

For example, looking back at this hand-created list of related questions, I must have gone through dozens of similar, overlapping searches and hundreds of questions (many with poor or generic titles) to make this list of about 25 questions. It would have been very helpful to be able to:

• Save the questions that I wanted to review without having to visit them directly. It would be easier to remove it from the list of saves when reviewing them all later.
• See that I saved them without having to look at each individual question (again). Fun fact, did you know that two titles can exist that differ only in punctuation or capitalization?

I don't know what the other icons are supposed to represent, and I can't think of any other buttons that would be useful. If they were informational icons (showing that I've already voted on it, alerting about new activity), that might be useful.

The only thing to keep in mind is that the questions shouldn't take up too much vertical space. (Yes, this was mentioned before.)

Answer 30

In the first screenshot...

• I kind of doubt many people will have a reason to save or share a link to a Q&A they haven't even opened up and see what it's really about. I think I would never.

• Where's the listing of custom filters, watched tags, ignored tags, and recently awarded badges in the sidebar?

• What's the rationale for moving the view count from the left to the bottom of the post card? It seems like a weird choice to me. The current location makes sense (grouping a bunch of stats-related info together on one side).