Make the election notification more prominent on the frontpage

Question

There's currently an election underway on Stackoverflow, though compared to previous elections the notice about this event is far less visible in my opinion. Instead of the system message banner, elections are now only displayed in the Community Bulletin.

The SE team is categorically and emphatically opposed to using the system banners for elections, so this alternative is out. What I propose is to at least make important events more noticeable by changing their color or distinguish them in any other way from the other events displayed in the bulletin.

Elections are important, more important than nearly everything else that is posted in that bulletin. They should be emphasized on the bulletin in some way.

Answer 1

It's a bit more noticeable now:

Also, you'll get a notification when the primary and election phases begin:

Note that while the system message certainly was very noticeable, that attribute also made it rather annoying to quite a few people:

• Make the system message banner less distracting
• Allow us an exit hatch to dismiss the system message notification bar
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/124269/it-should-be-possible-to-close-the-system-wide-reputation-changed-message
• Close button for "community moderator election is underway" notification?
• Is there a way to remove StackOverflow notice message
• One-time announcements has been shown persistently. How to get rid of them?
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/112425/should-i-be-able-to-close-the-cast-your-vote-gold-bar
• ...

To combat this, it was only displayed for two days at a time. That's at most 6 out of the ~15 days in an election cycle. So if you didn't visit the site on one of those days... Well, you probably wouldn't know about it at all, or if you noticed it and then came back later expecting to be able to follow the link, you might think the election had ended:

• Where did the election notification bar go on SO?
• The nomination links have disappeared?
• Where can I find a link to community moderator election?
• ...

The usability sucked. And by-design - system messages were built into the design of the sites for urgent notifications; they were intended to be intrusive, annoying, and transient. The bulletin board is, by design, less "in your face" - but it's also consistently available, on every day of the election, on nearly every page. If you miss seeing it the first 50 times, it'll still be there on page load #51.

FWIW: the Stack Overflow election is the fourth election where we've used the Bulletin Board for announcements. So far, the numbers on other sites have been somewhat lower than expected, but not dramatically so. While participation numbers in Stack Overflow elections have been trending down anyway... Face it: a lot of people just don't care.

Answer 2

The problem is that no one cares what's in the sidebar.

This isn't a fault of Stack Exchange, necessarily, but a fault of how most websites with a column layout have utilized the sidebar over the years.

Basically, people train themselves to ignore what's in the sidebar because it's overwhelmingly used for noise on the rest of the Internet (known as "banner blindness").

In buying into the same column layout, the sidebar suffers the same consequences.

Personally, I never look at the sidebar. I populated it with a bunch of tags when I first started but I never look at it now. I also barely notice the Community Bulletin.

I also don't have a problem with using a system message for a notification about the elections, but I know the system message annoys a good number of people, so I won't recommend that here.

However, one of the guiding purposes of Stack Exchange is to make the Internet better. To that end, we shouldn't be ready to adopt common misuses of UX design when it's been shown that they don't work.

The Community Bulletin currently does not do this effectively. Instead, we need to find something better than the Community Bulletin for things too important for it, but not important enough for a system message.

Answer 3

If the community bulletin was on the left hand sidebar it might make it a lot more noticeable.

1. On SE in general the left hand side bar has been left admirably white. Having something there all of a sudden when something important is going on should jolt a lot of people into noticing it.
2. The left side of the SE UI is normally used for interesting clicky things, arrows, ticks and the like. On SE I, and maybe others, pay attention to the left more than the right hand side, which doesn't have as many interesting things to play with.

Just a thought.