Why was the contact page interface changed suddenly?

Question

This is how the contact page roughly used to look like (Source: Internet Archive):

This is how it looks right now:

When was the page modified and if you don't mind, what was the reason for modifying the page?

Answer 1

Just to expand on Kristina's initial answer, which was much appreciated while we drafted and reviewed this longer one -

The main reason for this change is that we we wanted to make a new option on the /contact page for moderators, so they could have an easy and clear way to let us know if they wanted to step down. We strongly feel that it's important for mods to know that we support them both as moderators and when they feel it's time to end their tenure, so having this option gives them a clear way to reach out to us about it.

As we're making changes like this, we're asking our design team to think about the pages we'll be touching a bit more broadly and ask if there are simple changes that can be made at the same time to improve usability. In this case, they mentioned a few things:

1. The list was getting really long and there was concern from an accessibility aspect that it might be complicated for people to find the correct option.
   • We worked on coming up with reasonable categories that would help users find the option they needed without having to wait for screen readers to scan through all of the options.
   • We also want to make sure that people got to the right team to help them more quickly, but also to assure sane workflows for people on those teams.
2. The two-column format was more complicated than it needed to be and meant that, on mobile devices, the Help Center search was below the contact form. This means that many users likely weren't searching the Help Center at all.
   • Our Support team often replies to contacts with links to exactly these pages, so we want to increase the likelihood of people finding them on their own, thereby reducing the workload on our Support team.
   • We reworked the page so that the Help Center search was the first box users would encounter. Adding some keywords here will show a handful of results and point to a full list if there are more than fit in the page.
     

We'll be communicating with our Support team and checking in to see if this is increasing or decreasing the number of contacts they get and whether it's impacting how likely people are to use the correct contact reason when they do write in. If we need to make further improvements to this page, we'll look into that after we get some data to base our next steps on.

Answer 2

As Catija said, we wanted to add another option into the contact menu, and decided to take that opportunity to improve it a bit as well - sorting the contact options into topics and generally improving the UX for folks using the form. I implemented it myself - let us know if you spot any issues!