What does constructive criticism of a design change look like?

Question

Last week we rolled out the new network theme to several sites. Some of these sites had beautiful designs previously and now have a less striking look. Unsurprisingly, the response to these changes has been somewhat very negative. Even before Joe posted our master plan back in March, this has been the stage I've dreaded. Nobody likes losing things and the new theme is a clear loss for the "Cadillac" sites. It doesn't help that some of the changes have revealed bugs in the framework. It really doesn't help that we are pushing forward even though many people strongly disliked aspects of the mockups.

(Creating parody book covers has proved cathartic.)

I feel pretty strongly that insulting employees (particularly the designers who made the changes) is both counterproductive and morally wrong. Telling us we aren't listening seems unfair too. (A classic read on this subject is Kathy Sierra's "Listening to users considered harmful?".) Quitting the site over the new design seems extreme, but I respect people's values and recognize they aren't necessarily my own. Meanwhile, we appreciate detailed bug reports.

In between we see criticism with varying degrees of utility for us. For instance, we already know people don't like the new left bar. It's a central motivation for imposing the framework on sites and won't really prove it's worth until we are able to add features such as custom question list notifications to it. I personally am withholding judgement until it's on all sites so that I stop having to switch context when looking at another site.

I don't really know the best way to critique design changes, but I'd like to provide a few suggested criteria when answering announcements of new designs:

1. Avoid absolutes—"This is the worst design I've ever seen," might describe how you feel, but is demonstrably not true. (For clarity, I'm talking about BuzzFeed's design, but the 20 sites featured in the article are pretty bad too.)

2. Analyze the root problem—If you don't like some aspect of the design, try to answer the question "why?". Maybe the new color scheme doesn't work for color-blind or visually impaired folks. Or maybe they remind you of your alma mater's crosstown rival. Either way, explaining the real problem is more productive than "the colors suck".

3. Consider waiting a bit—How many times have you seen a website you use every day make some change to their UI that's really jarring but isn't a problem a week later? I really hate change, but it doesn't take me long to acclimate to it.

4. Try rephrasing rather than rehashing—We probably read the answer posted on another question, so there's no reason to repeat it verbatim. Meanwhile, rephrasing the criticism can often help. For instance, sometimes a CM will suggest a change to a design before we show it to meta, but the designers and developers go forward with their own idea. Once we show it to you, the community of users, the same issue (phrased in a new way) might come up and the design gets fixed based on that feedback. I'm not offended; I'm happy we can get the best design.

5. We're benevolent benevolent dictators—We've always been up front and forthcoming about new revenue streams especially when they drive major changes, and we try to communicate as far in advance of anything big as possible. That we don't decide to change course based on feedback isn't a symptom of not listening to it, but the animosity that this seems to create might be a symptom of us not communicating clearly enough. We'll try to do better, but please don't default to the worst scenario. It can mask sincerity and rob it of the consideration some complain we're not delivering. We're human, too, and very invested in this along with you, so 'jabs' certainly don't help and often honestly hurt. Jabs come in many forms, but implying that we're doing something for hidden reasons makes your feedback difficult to internalize or act upon.

Now might be a good time to say there are things I don't like about the designs myself:

• I think the left bar should be collapsible for users who don't like it.
• It's odd that arrow buttons and tags aren't customizable.
• I'd like to see a larger set of fonts available to sites.
• It's sad that really great designs (Judaism and Worldbuilding are two of my favorites) will be toned down and lose most of their character.
• Responsive design is nice, but it's not enough to make the changes worthwhile.

Now I trust Joe and his team to iterate on their work and make things better over time. (Though it's impossible to please everyone, of course.) And I'm excited for all the sites living with super generic designs that will get some level of customization. In the years to come, having a standard framework to aim for will allow us to roll out new features to the network with much less friction. So as much as I dislike the current state, I'm confident things will get better.

I understand if you don't see things the way I do. Over the years we've had a rough history of ignoring user feedback and leaving projects half-finished. The only way we can win back trust is to do better each day. You can help by providing actionable feedback.

Answer 1

You seem to be concerned about negative / not constructive feedback to recent announcements. Consider that matters of reciprocity may play some role here.

To find out if this can be related, I studied Stack Exchange features change log and counted amount of changes that looked like focused on the needs of site "core group" (users who care most).

Here is what I observed year by year:

- 2013: 14 (of total 69)
- 2014: 19 (of 82)
- 2015: 8 (of 34)
- 2016: 5 (of 41)
- 2017: 4 (of 29)
- 2018: 0 (of 23) ^{See also update on a year later at the bottom of this answer.}

One particularly prominent example is a triage development which has been silently aborted midway:

^{Triage was predicated on us rewriting all of the views. Which... Very nearly happened. And then didn't.}

You see, this looks like Stack Exchange team shrinks efforts on serving the needs of site core group (who are, not coincidentally, also most active at meta). And you can't realistically expect this to go unnoticed. Maybe people just feel the negligence and behave accordingly.

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Can't tell for others but myself, I certainly feel it and it influences they way I act. I think I voted down most if not all announcements in last few years, even those that I felt neutrally about (having dev access to voting data you can check whether my recollection is correct if you're interested).

Worth noting that it wasn't like that in the past. Back then I was inclined to vote it up, even when the announcements were about things I didn't like. It was like I saw the SE team do various things to make it better for me, so if they are doing something I dislike, maybe this will help them keep doing other things that are useful to me, meaning it makes sense for me to support them. You see, this seems to be really about reciprocity.

Now that SE stopped doing things useful to me, I also lost interest in supporting them doing anything else - because, no matter what they do, it ain't going to help me in any way.

I'd say it is now rather opposite: since they stopped doing things of use to me, and only keep making my life harder I feel inclined to make their lives harder in return. I observe on recent announcements tens-to-hundreds of downvotes, suggesting I may not be alone in feeling like that.

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Summing up, it is possible that your suggested criteria when answering announcements fall on deaf ears. The active meta audience may simply realize that SE team does nothing to address their needs, and in return, they are not inclined to help them do various things.

This would be natural wouldn't it. Jeff Atwood would probably say that losing constructive meta feedback is sad ("10% of the community feedback... have the potential to make the site clearly better for everyone...") but oh well.

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_{Attentive readers may notice that data analysis here ends at year 2018 and wonder if conclusions based on it are still up-to-date at their time of reading. Well, it really may be outdated - for example data for next year (2019) shows a trend that is very very different than that of previous 3-4 years. If you want to find out something about time frame different than was addressed here (2013-2018), just do your own study of the features change log for period you picked using this answer as an example of how to analyze it.}

Answer 2

Focusing the criticism on specific employees is inherently problematic and frequently steps over the "Be Nice" line. I understand why SE often hesitates to moderate heavily in these cases where the topic is SE itself, but I think we should consistently enforce the principle that meta is about the actual issues, and not the people.

Not assuming any hidden agendas is a good policy for all of meta, but I think in this case SE seems to have failed to convince the community about their primary agenda. The redesign is about making it easier to make future changes to various parts of SE. The sidebar is also one aspect that seems to be entirely about future uses (and Teams, which most sites don't have or know about). If the drawbacks of the redesign are immediately visible, and most advantages are in the far future, negative reactions aren't that surprising.

Another aspect is that SE is throwing a half-finished design at the sites. The responsive aspects are at the minimal necessary to work, but without larger changes that would make the design truly responsive (the sidebars dominate the actual content in many cases). The left sidebar doesn't really make sense unless you know about the future plans.

Telling us to wait is kind of an unfair requirement. You're asking us to trust SE to simply fix all the problems at some unspecified time in the future. We can only give reasonable feedback for the now, not the future.

The community also doesn't seem to have a good idea about which kind of changes are possible based on feedback, and which parts are not open to discussion. That leads to the complaints that SE isn't listening to any of the feedback.

SE might have also went a bit too far in unifying the sites, especially as some unique elements that are simply images are also being unified. This didn't go over well with many people, especially as the maintenance argument doesn't seem to fit these cases. SE should either explain the reasons for this better, or allow more unique aspects for the sites.

Answer 3

I think I am one of those who have been implied by the calling out names on the staff etc. And yes I did and I would like to mention why I insist on it.

Let's try your way of putting things:

Nobody likes losing things and the new theme is a clear loss for the "Cadillac" sites. It doesn't help that some of the changes have revealed bugs in the framework. It really doesn't help that we are pushing forward even though many people strongly disliked aspects of the mockups.

OK why do you insist on a terrible design then? Did you explain why you chose this way of design where lots of users spent ridiculous times to tweak and polish over the years? That's a clean no. For clarity again, we are not loosing anything. It's just a website we enjoyed creating a community and we(not just me others have spent more than me) spent ridiculous amounts of time to fix the answers because of your internal mistake caused. What kind of help did you offer? Well read it yourself

Double backslashes disappear from code

Tens of users fixed it themselves by using Data.SE and going through writing scripts etc. which you could have done it in a few hours with the scripts that everyone else provided. So we know a thing or two how to handle the site ourselves thanks to your zero contribution.

Let's have a look at what Taryn said

Double backslashes disappear from code

I wouldn't say that we're refusing to fix anything, we've got a huge backlog of projects and items in the queue that also have attention. It's fantastic that the community has been taking time to fix up these issues, and yes, we'd like to get something implemented to make this easier we just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Did you implement anything? No. Thus you might think that you are caring for the communities etc. but yeah let's skip that shall we?

I feel pretty strongly that insulting employees (particularly the designers who made the changes) is both counterproductive and morally wrong. Telling us we aren't listening seems unfair too.

It is really strange that you invoke the fairness cards. Over the years, we have continuously complained about imposing SO rules onto other sites. And the feedback we got is your last item. We do as we please. That's pretty fair indeed.

Then comes the fairer part. You told us that you are going to roll out a new theme and asked for feedback; there you go New TeX site theme coming soon

And what kind of response did we get? You discarded all and I repeat ALL feedback. Not a single thing mentioned there was applied. Now because of the negative feedback you are starting to fix things. TeX new site theme is live How is that really fair treatment? When it comes to appraisal and communities, we are all running towards the rainbows and unicorns hand-in-hand. And god forbid we disagree with you and suddenly we are ungrateful bastards. Again I'm choosing my words carefully. This is how you treat the communities and invoke fairness. Nice.

Lastly about the design, I am an average coder who does not code for living. I don't have massive skills and I don't really hang out in SE anymore. I was procrastinating during my PhD and after that, my engagement decayed rapidly. But even I know the difference between a frontend and a backend of a website. Currently numerous sites offer dynamic theming that can do incredible customizations. A couple of title bars and some arrows are really not the greatest challenges of human endeavor. The way you explain why you need these changes is quite an insult to all the experts' intelligence you host on SO. Your design team botched this and there is no sugarcoating available for it. You could have just accepted this and redesigned but no. You doubled down on it and now you are asking for empathy. That is not how it works.

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Anyways, this is my first and hopefully last meta post so here is what you could have done in my opinion (not that it matters but otherwise we are called as whiners not providing any constructive alternatives).

If you want to introduce the title bar squashed down then you could have said so.

Folks, the title bar is going to shrink vertically do you have ideas on how to make it more personalized for the site. In the meantime site names are going to shift to the left. Make your own decals and we will incorporate them.

It is this simple. And I would have worked on it because despite all of your efforts I liked to hang out there for killing time. This is what you did

We are going to trim your title bar. Deal with it.

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If you want to implement a left bar you could have said so

Folks, due to reasons that we cannot disclose we are going to implement a left side bar. We might add a background that will run down through the page for it for more personalized feel. Let us know what you think and offer yours.

And that stupid waste of space could be used for a bookmark type of personalization. Judging by what they are capable of worldbuilding and rgp (or rpg?) would have done wonders. What did you do instead?

New side bar is coming.

Well done indeed.

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You could have waited until you finished the details or just mention them

Folks, we don't have yet a mechanism for custom arrows. So be prepared for some regression.

What did you do instead?

Arrows are generic now.

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I can go on forever. Is this really how you want to play this fairness game? Please save it for the uninitiated.

I decided to leave not because of a design which is nothing but a look on a site. But the way you treat communities which made you what you are as if children whining all the time broke the camel's back.

Answer 4

I really like this guidance, Jon; giving constructive feedback on design changes is something I've struggled quite a bit with over the years, both as a user and as an employee of the company making the changes. It's easy to say "I don't like it", much more work to articulate why... And I've often found it nearly impossible to explain why in a way that is actually effective.

But I wanna comment a bit on the "benevolent dictators" portion.

We've always been up front and forthcoming about new revenue streams especially when they drive major changes

That's... Not quite true. At very least, it's misleading. We really, really dropped the ball on this for a couple of years while we went all-in on trying to integrate Careers, Jobs, Teams, Dev Story... Not that we didn't try - Tim in particular was instrumental in laying out our plans, repeatedly, in as public a manner as possible - but... There was a LOT of miscommunication (or lack of communication) internally, and it showed: we promised things that we didn't build, we built things without clearly connecting them to our goals for generating revenue, and we stopped building things that folks were already using without telling them anything. We didn't mean to... But we did anyway.

And we lost a LOT of trust over that. Deservedly. We didn't mean to, we didn't want to, but we did and deservedly so. If we're gonna make up for those mistakes, we gotta start by owning it: facing up to the fact that it's going to take a LOT of hard work to rebuild that trust, and explicitly avoiding the mistakes that led to this miscommunication the first time around.

Here's an example: from an end-user perspective, there are two prime motivators for this latest set of design changes.

1. We have close to a decade of technical debt bound up in custom designs; we've had sites waiting on designs and even simple bug-fixes for years because of this - it's completely unsustainable, and so we need to fix it. What this means for end-users: standardized, well-maintained site designs, at the cost of losing some of the unique design elements.

2. We need to support a flexible navigation scheme for Channels, which we need for the Teams product, which we need to make money, which we need to keep running servers and paying staff. What this means for end-users: primary site navigation moves to a left-hand sidebar.

We've talked extensively about both of them for at least the past year, but I think it's important to remember that while internally those two things are bound up together fairly tightly, for the average person using any given site that's not a Team on Stack Overflow they're very different.

In a sense, we are slapping a sidebar on the TeX site to make money... Even if we never intend to make any money from the TeX site. And... We should be straight with 'em about that; we've already said as much, in public, several times over the past year... Pretending it's not a factor now just makes our explicit motivates seem ulterior. And that's not building trust.

An awful lot of folks are not going to like some of these changes, at least at first. But I have high hopes that with time, this will be our opportunity to demonstrate our ability to communicate clearly, honestly, and rebuild that essential faith in our word.

Answer 5

This has been kind of a difficult issue for me, because it's the first large-scale change by Stack Exchange I've mostly opposed in my four years here, and it affects all the sites on the network. I was surprised to discover just how much I care about a little robot who lives on the side of a webpage, unnoticed by most users. And I've spent plenty of time arguing for why that robot means a lot to Worldbuilding, and the symbolism behind it.

I would be very, very proud if Worldbuilding got up in arms about the new design we're likely to have, but I would be very, very annoyed if the community did it unconstructively. I think we the mods find it easier to not get as annoyed because we've interacted with the Team a lot, and have a pretty good relationship with y'all. And even with things like this, that experience means I trust you when you talk about what you're trying to do and what your rationale is behind it. I know normal users don't have that kind of relationship or trust.

Now . . . the main point of this answer is to perhaps ask for some more communication and rationale behind certain changes, as has already been suggested, but for a different reason: Many of us on the network have no idea what this behind-the-scenes design process looks like, how it works, or what sort of changes are feasible. I have some very, very basic HTML and CSS experience, but no idea to tell whether a design change is easy or impossible. That's slightly frustrating. So when it's said that certain changes will make bug fixing easier and stuff - well, I accept that on a high level, again partly because I trust y'all, but I'm making that decision based on trust. I have no idea why those things are true.

I think that has frustrated some people; we can't see what's going on behind the scenes, and maybe we simply don't understand a lot of it anyway. Therefore, it's not easy to see what feedback is being taken into account, what the relationship is between what we say and what's done, whether suggestions are feasible, and, more importantly, why something cannot be done. So I guess I'm like a little kid giving his parents the old "But why, Mommy?" when asked why I have to eat my spinach, because I don't know how nutrition works.

Long story short . . . I think some of the current - and especially future - outrage could be tempered with a more detailed explanation of the above: why certain things are or aren't possible. That way, when someone says that the voting buttons have to be standardized, we all understand why. We're not taking it purely on trust.

Oh, and yes, some of the criticism has been way out of line. Way out of line. I'm not pleased with what I'm seeing. Making ad-hominem attacks at employees who are just doing their jobs is . . . embarrassing and shameful. I'll say that I don't like the designs, but I'll also say that I don't like that style of feedback.

Answer 6

I think there are some things the SE Team could do in order to regain the trust they've lost with what appears to be a significant part of the community. Here are a few ideas

1. Don't say things are impossible. We're not talking about the halting program. Any site design is in principle possible. The question is developer resources and technical debt.

2. Ask the communities what they like, rather than assuming. For example, in the post on fonts, the Christianity site gets to keep its custom font. At first glance this sounds great, most other sites would love to get custom fonts but they won't be allowed to. But the actual community doesn't like the font and has been asking for it to change. I'm sure there are many other examples.

3. Do whatever you can to give sites character. Maybe there's something in the custom designs that really is making too much technical debt to keep. We understand. But surely there are aspects of the new site framework that open up new possibilities of site customisation and characterisation.

   So for example, when the team says that "It was a mistake that we ever allowed for those [voting buttons] to be themed" it sounds like the team thinks it was a mistake for sites to have character. It sounds like you resent our enjoyment of our little buttons. Rather than saying it was a mistake, the team could have said that they'd love for all sites to be able to have custom buttons, and maybe they will be able to in the future, but for now they have to be standardised.

Answer 7

I mean... I've been suffering for several months due to the Stack Overflow theme change. Using Stack Overflow is a much worse experience for me.

There have been multiple largescale efforts for redesign and all have received fairly significant backlash.

Why?

Because few of the active users are experiencing any problems the "solutions" will "fix." And making the user experience worse for those users will result in frustration and backlash. Not to mention when it ruins something people have love and cherish (an identity).

This is even more pronounced when those users are effectively supplying Stack Overflow the company with its free labor that enables it to be what it is.

You can dress this up all you want but that is the underlying issue.

Answer 8

Telling us we aren't listening seems unfair too.

There's probably a reason people are doing that though.

Over the years we've had a rough history of ignoring user feedback and leaving projects half-finished.

Ah, there it is. Not much to do about that except doing it better now. Improvement will be noticed, but trust goes faster away than it returns. It takes time. A lot of it.

What we could do, is look more at the bright side of things. I for one am glad the base of design is getting more generic. Why? Because I remember the graduation of Code Review.

The graduation of Code Review was messy (read the full story here). The community had just about died before it rose from the ashes. Then it almost died again and... oh well, you get the point.

What I wanted to say was eventually the site graduated. Without a design. Because the backlog for the designers was so huge it took way over 6-8 weeks to get it done. The announcement for graduation was in 2014, the design went live in 2015. 61 weeks later. It took so long there was talk about design independent graduation (graduate now, get your design, colours and everything else indicating you're actually graduated later). That showed us how complicated the process of graduating was at Stack Exchange.

Anything and everything speeding up that needlessly long process is essentially a good thing. Sure, there are a couple of side effects to changes. But the intention to fix the design problem is great. This improvement is something some of us have been waiting for, for years. Literally.

Well done.

Answer 9

Since we actually managed to get ourselves a new/reworked theme changed from the original prototype, I figure it might be useful to share what we did right.

We absolutely hated the original theme Super User had - and between my meta post (which admittedly would have been better if I'd calmed down at the time) and various suggestions from the community, we ended up with a theme with only the general generic complaints.

I was actually a little more gruff/angry in my post than I wanted to be but it really came down to what we disliked (default-ish theme, specific elements), what we liked on other themes, and what we wanted, and it worked out OK.

I'd also like to point out that, well, the designer is not going to have the same grasp of a site's "uniqueness" as someone who has been on it a while will have. I admittedly hadn't thought about that, when I complained, and it's probably useful if you need to put across why a specific design element is important.

I personally love the current theme we have, and it's only because we engaged and spoke up and let folks know what bothered us.

There's a few things that we did that worked great:

1. Start complaining early: go through the mockups with a fine toothed comb. SU lost a lot of the design elements we disliked because we noticed and spoke up against them.

• "This thing is terrible" vs. "This thing mangles up our logo"

  or:

• "The new logo is drab" vs. "Our site identity has always been designed around a two-color logo/robot"

2. Focus on specific design elements you dislike and explain why you dislike against them.

We didn't like the 'filler' background on ours and explained why. I know a few sites recently complained about their backgrounds as well (though after release).

Especially where it's an item with emotive appeal, I'd still love to have sites retain the voting arrows and tags (and I do hope once there's a solid framework for new sites, this is revisited), and at this point I still feel strongly that this should be revisited at some point.

3. Make it clear why you want certain things.

While it hasn't quite gotten a response yet (or a site design) - I love how Worldbuilding made a case for why Pandora and Slartibotfast should be kept. Its certainly better than anything I wrote for Super User.

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Stuff that doesn't quite work...

Per-site metas have no reputation. Just... write an answer, in depth to why the current suggested themes don't work. Comments are just not the good way to do it. Getting angry isn't the best way to do it. Getting angry in comments is the worst way to do it.

Doing it after the new design is actually out kinda means folks already have it out after a consultation period. It means a lot of work getting duplicated, and there's a lot of sites to do. If you need something changed, do it as early as possible.

Answer 10

Gnat has a good point that the development focus has clearly shifted away from "tools users need" and onto "things that make us look pretty."

Haney staunchly promised a revised search feature being rolled out with Channels. Well...Channels, I mean Teams are done. Pressed, boxed, shipped, and in stores today. Search? Nowhere to be seen. We've been asking for a better search bar for years at this point. Like five. Stack Overflow is only ten years old; how can a feature that's needed a tuneup for half its life get ignored like this?

Instead we got a site redesign that's...mixed at best. Some things can be styled and some things can't (despite literally being part of the same sprite sheet (yes, I will continue to bring this up)). The available colors for the header are borderline indistinguishable from other sites. For example, PPCG (where the new theming has rolled out) looks like a meta site. Hooray, it no longer looks like a beta site...I guess...?

We've had the new default unified theme up on Programming Puzzles & Code Golf for a month and a half now and the response there has been really positive.

And from The Nineteenth Byte (PPCG's site chat):

How do I downvote a website theme?

Yeah. Super positive.

Server Fault looks freaking identical, and so does Mathematical, Photography, Tex, Unix & Linux, and Ask Different (they're all black/gray). Super User still looks like a beta site (it's blue). Ask Ubuntu is beta-but-red. Mi Yodeya is the only one that actually looks like itself.

Sure there are a couple of subtle design markings in the header, and there's a custom logo, but if I squint and step back a few paces I literally can't tell them apart. I'm awash in a sea of uniformity (and to think: someone thought these were great examples; I dare you to replace those images with their beta and meta incarnations and repost it on the blog and see if anyone notices the swap).

That's not what we wanted from the revamped site themes. Sure, we know that the full customization that used to happen was way complicated and not uniform, but what we got was...comparable to taking away the theme from sites that had themes so no one had it. It wasn't an upgrade, it was a revision to status quo: "everyone already looks like beta, so we'll just leave it like that and say its new."

Remember: "Everything is Awesome" is the theme-song to distopia.

Rocks, clocks, and socks, they're awesome Figs, and jigs, and twigs, that's awesome

Everything is awesome, including conformity, brain washing, willful ignorance, and government spying.

Stack Exchange (the company) seems to be trying to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls and put on fake smiles and repeat the mantra "everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine" hoping that if they do it enough, it'll come true. It won't. It never will. Not unless you address the core underlying concerns that your users have.

And those concerns are one, simple, thing:

• We do not have the tools we need to do our jobs

Sure, it's a pretty broad concern, but it's still true. It may be a technologically challenging task, but it's still true. The search isn't good enough, the duplicate-finder search is worse (I use Google to find the things I need), I've seen moderators complain fairly regularly that "they can't just do that." I think the last one I saw dealt with a bad audit and the fact that it couldn't be removed as an audit without validating the post (which was spam) in some way (in this case, it would have cleared the spam flags).

I've also seen spam posts show up as audits where it was literally impossible for the reviewer to determine that the post was spam because the required information (e.g. six identical answers posted to six questions, all deleted) was outright hidden from them (because those other answers were deleted and if the reviewer doesn't have 10k rep, they can't see them).

Or there was this failed audit where a post was deleted and turned into an audit, but the post was actually good content, and reviewing it as such failed the audit. Only solution? Head to chat and get the attention of a 10k user or moderator to undelete it.

Which I suppose I can just sum up as "the audit system we have is terrible, everyone knows it's terrible, but nothing's ever been done to try and fix it."

Do I need to go on?

There's a reason your users are overflowing with negativity. And it all falls right here:

Often (and more often recently) I've heard colleagues dismiss meta feedback. --Jon Ericson ♦

Ignoring your users is never the right action.

The more (generic) you dismiss feedback, the more negative the response will get. Because you're not listening, so people point out the fact that you're not listening, which gets ignored because it's so negative. It's a self-perpetuating problem.

Subtle hint: YOU AREN'T LISTENING

Are we good now? Great. Break the loop. Let's get to work making the site more awesome. Figure out what tools moderators need, figure out what in that list is feasible, build it, test it, ask for feedback, listen to that feedback, make changes, roll it out, and repeat.

Answer 11

Some things you can do to disarm the situation is something I learned from working in customer service a long time ago.

1. Acknowledge the concerns of the customer. Nobody wants to be ignored.
2. Acknowledge the customer has a point, people have reasons for what they do.
3. Ignore the noise, listen to the feedback. Someone may have phrased something poorly, even rudely, but they may have some good advice.
4. Don't forget your customers are customers. Every one of us who contributes to this site also contributes to the bottom line. It is the traffic and value added that contributes to the overall value of this site. Annoy people at your own peril
5. When you tell people to leave if they don't like something, they will.
6. Remain humble. You're point #5 "We are benevolent dictators" isn't going to win any friends or agreement and will only make the angry voices angrier. It's saying "We know better than you." and "No matter what you say, we're going to do our own thing anyway" (see 5 above)
7. If people are telling you that you're not listening, you're not listening. (See point 2 above) This doesn't mean you have to bend to the will of every last person with something to say, but it does mean that you should openly address each issue that is brought up. "Nope, we're doing it this way" makes someone feel dismissed. "Well, we're doing it this way because..." or "While it's been suggested we don't do X because of Y we found that Z is the reason we need to". That shows that you're listening.
8. If you think the customer is the problem, then you're the problem. If your response to complaints is to blame the complainers, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Answer 12

Nobody likes losing things and the new theme is a clear loss for the "Cadillac" sites.

The first step in fixing a problem is identifying the problem. Seems that you have identified the problem, so ...

It really doesn't help that we are pushing forward even though many people strongly disliked aspects of the mockups.

Uhm, ... same as above?

Telling us we aren't listening seems unfair too.

Agree, it is technically unfair because you are listening ... only to feedback that you are comfortable hearing.

For example, here I asked you for three things:

• The need for four links to Stack Overflow on the main page.
• Statistical data on actual usage of the left bar.
• Moving the links from the left bar to the top as in case of Server Fault.

There have been a grand total of ZERO responses from your end. Previously, you used to delete my comments saying you will respond only to feedback posted as answers, so I did and there we go. No response at all. Maybe my answer wasn't "constructive" enough? :)

Another example, here on the same announcement, I asked you to hide the left bar by default because people who don't login (such as those coming in from internet search) have no use for it. Again, no response.

Oh, and there's the small matter of the vote score on that announcement (currently -186). Let me just say you have an unusual definition of either "listening" or "unfair".

we already know people don't like the new left bar. It's a central motivation for imposing the framework on sites ...

Translation: We asked you for feedback, we didn't hear what we were hoping to hear, so we just went ahead and did what we wanted to do anyway. Oh, and it is unfair to say we didn't listen to feedback, because you see, technically we did listen¹ to feedback. We just decided to ignore it.

won't really prove it's worth until we are able to add features such as custom question list notifications to it

Sorry for sounding patronizing. I would like to introduce the development team to the YAGNI Principle.

That aside, if the goal of the left bar was to introduce this "custom list", then that is what you should have included in the first place. Would you sell a car without seats asking users to BYOC (Bring Your Own Chairs) for the time being and that the car would prove its "worth" when you add the seats next year?

There's also the possibility of the "custom list" being useful mainly on Stack Overflow and a handful of sites, but I will reserve my judgement on that until the change is actually rolled out.

If you don't like some aspect of the design, try to answer the question "why?"

Alright, here we go. With ch ch ch ch, you pulled the plug on Unicode support despite 1/6th of your sites actively needing it. Apparently, nobody figured out this would be a problem internally within the company, until someone responded to the public announcement. Why? I tried answering that question (even though that should really be done by Stack Overflow, not me), haven't figured out anything yet.

How many times have you seen a website you use every day make some change to their UI that's really jarring but isn't a problem a week later?

Let's ask a different question as well: how many times have you come across a grand party being thrown to introduce the "next big upgrade" only for users to ignore it entirely and continue using the older versions for several years?

Here's a fun anecdote: I still use Pale Moon web browser because:

1. Drop down menu from the title bar
2. Vertical tab bar with tree style grouping
3. DownThemAll

Quantum (or whatever Firefox calls its latest gimmick) makes it impossible to do any one of these.

I really hate change, but it doesn't take me long to acclimate to it.

I suspect that the question of "do you have a choice?" has something to do with that, as well. Besides, it works for you doesn't mean it works (or should work) for everyone else.

We've always been up front and forthcoming about new revenue streams especially when they drive major changes, and we try to communicate as far in advance of anything big as possible.

Ok, let's talk about ch ch ch ch for a bit, which (I think you will agree) qualifies as driving major change. I don't see any mention at all about this having anything to do with any revenue stream. I do see a lot of incomprehensible technobabble, which wouldn't make much sense to anyone who is not a software developer, and even some of them will have difficulty in understanding what you are talking about.

And I'm excited for all the sites living with super generic designs that will get some level of customization.

Making all sites look more or less identical, getting rid of customizations of the vote buttons and badge icons, dropping Unicode support (as stated above) is probably "exciting" to you and you are entitled to your opinion, of course. The majority of the user community doesn't share your excitement though.

You own the company, so you are, of course, free to run it as you see fit. I humbly request that you just state that unambiguously instead of wasting everyone's time by asking for "feedback" and then ignoring it to do what you wanted to do anyway.

Lastly, "I'm just doing my job" is not an absolute defence against criticism. Even the pilot who flew the plane irresponsibly killing all 400 people on board was "just doing his job". People don't criticize you for "doing your job", they criticize you because they would like to see you do it better.

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¹ Supertechnically, we did read feedback.

Answer 13

Last week we rolled out the new network theme to several sites

You have sites for really educated people of many different faculties. Some of them only exist, because their users care much about graphic design.

Your »one size fits all« approach insults us. We are spending countless hours on stackexchange. You know a part of us cares a lot about the look of things. And you dare to ignore that and deliver a uniform network theme, which doesn't meet the level of our contributions.

The new design of TEX.se for example just looks cheap. As percusse writes, you neglected every single suggestion users gave beforehand.

You insulted your users and now you are giving a speech, how unfair our reaction were.

Answer 14

I'm a big fan of debugging things. The foreword to Painless Project Management mentions this, and is available online. An excerpt:

And so, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, if you’re a restaurant, and you want to thrive, you have to carefully debug everything.

You have to make sure that there’s always someone waiting to greet guests. This person must learn never to leave the maitre d’ desk to show someone to their table, because otherwise the next person will come in and there will be nobody there to greet them. Instead, someone else needs to show patrons to their tables. And give them their menus, right away. And take their coats and drink orders.

You have to figure out who your best customers are—the locals who come on weekday nights when the restaurant is relatively quiet—and give them tables quickly on Friday night, even if the out-of-towners have to wait a little longer.

You need a procedure so that every water glass is always full.

Every time somebody is unhappy, that’s a bug. Write it down. Figure out what you’re going to do about it. Add it to the training manual. Never make the same mistake twice.

Eventually, Isabella’s became a fabulously profitable and successful restaurant, not because of its food, but because it was debugged. Just getting what we programmers call “the edge cases” right was sufficient to keep people coming back, and telling their friends, and that’s enough to overcome a review where the New York Times calls your food “not very good.”

Great products are great because they’re deeply debugged. Restaurants, software, it’s all the same.

You may recognise the author.

I think everyone understands (or enough people understand) the value of gracious feedback. Perhaps that gracious feedback has degenerated over time, perhaps through bruising experiences with Stack Overflow the company, or perhaps for some other reasons.

I would suggest the value of ungracious feedback is at least as great as the value of gracious feedback:

Every time somebody is unhappy, that’s a bug. Write it down. Figure out what you’re going to do about it. Add it to the training manual. Never make the same mistake twice.

And that relentlessly focusing on new customers over your regulars may be a bad idea:

You have to figure out who your best customers are—the locals who come on weekday nights when the restaurant is relatively quiet—and give them tables quickly on Friday night, even if the out-of-towners have to wait a little longer.

Answer 15

Criticism and disagreement versus contempt

The most important point for me as product manager and the recipient of much of the feedback (constructive and not) on various metas is how the feedback is delivered. We aren't going to agree all the time. That's okay. But how we disagree and how that disagreement is communicated says a lot about who will listen to the feedback and even who you are communicating to with the feedback.

Serendipity is amazing. The other day I was listening to a political podcast and it made this point so much better than I could.

Civil disagreement is where you want the other person to hear you and the other person to respond. Uncivil disagreement, which is contempt based, is one in which you're playing to your own audience. - Ezra Klein Show on How to disagree better

An occasional problem with comments and answers on meta is that they seem more interested in scoring points (actual and metaphorical). Instead of responding to the post, they speak to others who are equally upset about whatever product/UX change is being made. The result is that the commenter uses over the top language, denigrates the changes and or the people who made them, calls into question their abilities and shows general contempt for my team.

This approach may get up votes, but those votes don't influence the product team. A respectful argument will.

When changes occur, they will be in response to feedback that:

• explains their perspective/use case,
• considers available information on the motives for and goals of the changes, and
• treats the recipient of the feedback as a valuable, intelligent and capable human being.

There are two things that the community can do that will help to combat this problem:

1. Work to edit out unhelpful language from post.
2. and, I like to respectfully ask you to hit the reset button on our relationship.

My team is committed to improving Q&A for you and all our users. If we can let some of the stuff from the past go and work together to develop mutual trust, then we can collaborate and make significant enhancements to the sites that you love.