What's the single biggest barrier to entry on Stack Overflow?

Question

Looking at the discussion here so far, a lot of it has understandably been focused on regular users; not necessarily high rep users, but people who have essentially "committed" to the site in some way, and know a reasonable amount about it. Suggestions like fine-grained notification settings are great for those of us "in the know", but it's a pretty high-end feature.

That kind of user - while obviously important - probably accounts for a relatively small proportion of page views. In particular, I guess (and Jeff may have figures for this) that most page views don't come through the front page at all: they're straight from a search result.

This question is aimed at encouraging users to take a fresh browser which they aren't logged into, do a search which gets a Stack Overflow result (e.g. int c# downsides) and seeing what it would look like to a completely new user.

• Is the meaning of the information obvious to you?
• Is this a community you would want to join, if you didn't already know about it?
• Is the navigation, etc. obvious?

I haven't actually done the experiment myself yet (at least, not committing enough time to it to give a meaningful answer) but I may do so some time in the future. It's hard to forget everything we already know about Stack Overflow and any quirks it might have, but I think it's a worthwhile thing to try.

Answer 1

The number of different "views" can be unintuitive even to me who uses the site every day (for 20 days and counting - c'mon WOOT!)

Clicking on the logo (/) give a slightly different view than clicking questions.

Also the recent page is some time hard to find for new users.

I think SO would benefit form a simplification of "views" - less is more.

Answer 2

Hands down the search feature. Sorry but it's just plain useless. Anything that's worse than a Google custom site search should be replaced by a Google custom site search.

It's one reason I hardly ever downvote duplicates: I can't blame people for not finding them most of the time. Sometimes I know the duplicate exists because I've seen it before and still can't find it.

Answer 3

...seeing what it would look like to a completely new user.

• Is the meaning of the information obvious to you?

If by "information" you include informations about the site, the all "vote-accept" feature is quite "unclear" for new occasional users.

They do not read the FAQ (what for? They have a question, they want an answer).

They may infer the all "voting-selecting answer" thing by looking at other questions, but for very narrow topic (few views, fewer answers), they are a bit at a loss about what they are supposed to do with answers.

I know there is already a lot (tooltips on arrows and tick signs, red box on upvote to remind an answer can be 'ticked', reminder on questions to select an answer...).

But those mechanisms are not valid for the occasional user with a quick post, a look two days later (oh cool! Here's my answer!), and... nothing. He is gone.

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Proposition: rather than "first time here? Check out the FAQ!", I would rather have a:

First time here, take the feature tour!
(as mentioned by gnat in the comments, a kind of feature tour has been implemented in the about page, so... three and a half years later: status-completed)

Feature tour: 5 static HTML pages (1/5, 2/5, ..., 5/5) mentioning the five most important thing to know about SO, like for instance:

• ask a question (and look after suggested questions to avoids dups)
• post an answer
• vote (up or down, on answers for your questions, or on other answers)
• comment (or vote on comment)
• select an answer (or post your own and select it)

5 pages, colored graphics with few text and lots of arrows and circle to highlight important parts, around a concrete use case scenario (a story).
No screencast (too long).
Anything more verbose is likely to be skipped.

(And then, an "advanced feature tour" for those who are interested and want to go beyond the common use-cases)

Answer 4

Having to navigate the OpenID login system to become a full member of the community was a bit of a barrier when I first started. It may have become easier for new users since then, but there was certainly a lot of grumbling at the time.

Answer 5

I think it's perfect, personally. I found Stack Overflow through Google, searching for something. The fact that the most up-voted questions are on the top makes finding the answer to your question extremely quick.

The only "barrier to entry" that I found when I first joined was all the "inside jokes" (like you :P) and acronyms (call me stupid, but I didn't know what "SO" meant for the longest time). But I guess that's to be expected, and it doesn't really hamper one's ability to find the answer to his questions quickly.

Nowdays, if I'm looking for something on Google and I see a result from SO, I go there first thing.

Edit: I'd like to add that the one thing that did not make sense to me at first was community wikis. I just didn't understand the point of them. It didn't help that everyone else magically knew when questions should be made wikis or not, but never really gave any reasons. I got the hang of it eventually, but at first I always got nervous when asking a question, and asked myself, "Should this be a community wiki? Is it going to get closed if I don't make it one?" The solution to this would be to add some kind of "help" or "what's this?" link next to the community wiki checkbox, that goes to the SOFAQ or a similar page explaining what community wikis are and what they're used for.

Answer 6

Unable to find questions you can answer

I find that one of the problems that I face is that I feel unable to contribute back. I can become overwhelmed by all the questions on the site that I am unable to answer, and when I do spot a question I can answer, there are already a half dozen answers with at least one of them superior to what I could have written. This can be discouraging.

I'm not sure how to resolve this issue though. Ideas anyone?

Answer 7

In response to the "Is this a community you want to join" point:

I believe the community can seem to be really harsh sometimes.

I've seen beginner/"noob" questions getting downvoted just because the OP has missed something obvious. Instead of helping the OP, some people just seem to start flaming them. Here's an example of what I'm talking about, it was at -4 when I first viewed it.

I know you'll always get a minority who let the community down in this way, but I find it concerning that for some people this is the first experience they get of StackOverflow. I'd prefer if it was a positive one.

It's not a problem that can be solved with algorithms or clever features on the site. The community just need to realise that the person asking the question is a human being who has a problem and is asking for help. They shouldn't be punished if they don't have enough knowledge to ask the question "correctly".

Answer 8

Nothing is perfect, ever. It's a flawed world running flawed systems. That aside.

I guess there are a few issues to consider:

As a Google searcher I am looking for the "objective" correct answer to a question, since there are little to no incentives to improve old posts quite often information is spread between multiple answers, as a newbie I would imagine that seeing the same question answered 5 times by 5 different people quite confusing.

For example: look at lock keyword in C# ... this is the result of a search for the lock keyword in C#.

We all know that there is a better way to phrase the question and title the question, we just don't bother. We all would have ways to improve the answer, we just don't bother. We all know the question should probably be split up so it can be dealt with more throughly, we have no way to do that.

I think Stack Overflow as a community is way too focused at the last 1 hour of activity than improving and refining the body of knowledge in the expert system. I think this hurts the new users.

I think the community does quite a lot to help facilitate collaboration, but as a newbie you just don't realize how fast you need to be to get in on it. It may seem like there is this barrage of questions that somebody else (hint Marc or Jon :) seem to constantly get right. This may deter you from participating.

When I started out the whole community wiki thing really confused me, I think that is one area that newbies must find very confusing.

I had no problems with the OpenID piece, I actually really like it, helps me forget passwords which is one thing I love forgetting.

Answer 9

I was here pretty much since the beginning, so I can't say for sure, but I think newbies get something of a mixed message from all the vestigial subjective questions. In the first month or so of SO--before we really knew what the site would become--everyone was asking and answering and voting up subjective questions like "What's your favorite programming X?" Nowadays those kinds of questions are quickly downvoted and closed. New users might find that the vestigial subjective questions have lots of votes and assume they are still popular, only to get shot down when they ask one. Even if it is a good enough "subjective" question that it is not immediately closed, they get told "make that community wiki or else", even though they probably have no idea what in the world "community wiki" even means.

Related: my thoughts on community wiki.

Answer 10

I believe there is a barrier for new users, especially the ones who register and ask a question never to return. Looking at the users page there are thousands upon thousands who have a single rep point. I wonder why these people choose not to return. Are they unsure that they should come back and tick an answer, is this highlighted well enough? What can be done to retain these people and make them an active participant once there question has been answered? Do they get an email asking them to mark their first question? Would giving them a badge straight away help to capture the hearts, even if it retained 10% of them. It would be interesting to do some a/b testing around these new users.

Answer 11

The lack of a single-sign-on is the biggest barrier for entry to me - I suspect it can be done by something simple like loading an image from the other sites with a suitable unique logon token (say, a UUID) on the query string, and sending back the appropriate cookie with it.

Answer 12

IMHO, inability to search on site is one of the single biggest barriers.

Saying Google is the defacto UI is fine if you only ever do a single search and find the answer first try. For reference, see Point #7 in the 'Nine Building Blocks' section of this 2009 article where Joel Spolsky speaks about this:

Google is UI: Stack Overflow was built around the assumption that people will go to Google which will send them to the right page. Each URL has the name of the question; each URL is permanent and clean, Metatags, sitemaps; anything and everything was done to ensure Stack Overflow's pages looked "reasonable to search engines."

But once you are already on S/OFU and you want to re-search (as in do another search) or find something else, are we really expected to go back to Google, do the new search, just to end up right back on the same site (S/OFU) we were just at?!

That's not a good user experience.

And as Cletus mentioned in his answer above, I feel sorry for the poor n00bs who come here thinking it's awesome, ask a seemingly innocent question, and then get shouted/voted down for asking a dupe and not searching properly before they asked. And yes, I said 'shouted down', because despite what a lot of experienced users many think, that's what it'd feel like for a new user who's unfamiliar with the S/OFU culture.

I think improving the S/OFU search is really important, for heavy and new users alike.

Answer 13

As someone who is fairly new to SO, I can still fully relate to being a complete newbie (although I feel I'm quickly being assimilated.)

1) I think the "Ask Question" button should be more prominent. I think it should also advertise that there is no registration needed (subtext or hover over). To me, not needing to register for a site to ask or answer a question is huge. I think this alone is a large contributer to the success of SO.

2) I must agree with a previous answer that talked about OpenID. Up until now, I've not been forced to use OpenID on any site. I've got unique usernames and passwords on hundreds of sites (this should indicate something very bad... I'm just not sure what.) I had to first read up on OpenId, then find out which of my email addresses would work with open id.

3) I lost a question or two because the cookie was destroyed when I first used the site. I entered an email address when asking the first question, but I was not able to use OpenId with that email address. I thought maybe I would get the questions associated with my account after entering that email address in my profile, but no.

Answer 14

How the existing community treats new users

1. If you don't have at least 100 rep, any question you post is pretty much ignored.

2. "Should be community wiki." WTF is Community Wiki?

3. OpenID was a bit of a shock.

4. Downvoting without an explanation (irritating to veteran users at best, incomprehensible by new users).

Answer 15

Also as a note if you're checking Jon's link, log out from SO and then check it out. Since there will be ads and a popdown saying "First time here, check the FAQ".

Answer 16

It would be helpful to have a noob/first-timer version of the web interface, maybe with just a big Ask A Question button and a big Answer This Question box...and, of course, a prominent search box.

I'm just thinking in terms of non-technical users I'd like to try the StackExchange approach on, most of whom would be overwhelmed looking at the current GUI with all the tabs at the top of each page, and the tags listed down the side.

The Internet Marketing community throw around a statistic along the lines of...you have about 3-5 seconds to capture a user's attention before they leave the website again.

So, ideally, you want to make it incredibly obvious to the first-timer what options are available.

There could be a "Switch to Advanced View" toggle somewhere on the page for anyone who wants more options later.

Answer 17

Copy paste of my rant-thread on meta

• The noob questions have all been answered so you use search
• You found something helpful, but you can't vote up
• You need clarification, but you can't comment
• You have a $120k degree from a top-five institution in a related field (electronics.SE), but aren't allowed to provide input (should I fax my diploma in???)
• You have plenty of rep (well, I thought >100 and >2 years of service meant something); at Stack Overflow that's worth nothing
• You think it's stupid and try write a rant in meta about it, but can't post it so
• You give the fuck up and write off Stack Exchange as a circle jerk larger only than the circular-reputation-barrier

In Scotland I was told they wouldn't accept my pounds because they had the queen's picture on them. It was funny, because it was a joke.

So no...it's not a community I consider worth dealing with. I don't have time to rep farm each community just so I can vote up something that helped me, leave a comment, or that I happen to already know is the correct answer; I have work to do...

Basically the site gets in the way of my desire to be helpful by assuming I can't be helpful.

Specifically regarding voting up comments and answers, I should be allowed to do that. Just limit the rep that can be received/day from doing that if you're worried about people farming it for their own purposes.