How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
I thought the article mentioned this, but there's a user preference to turn that off ("Disable stickyness").
I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.
IMO, fixed navbars are almost as bad as popups.
Oh man, I've gotta strongly disagree with this. To me, those are just distracting and in practice often end up being fidgety. For tall webpages I think an easy and simple alternative is having a link like <a href="#">top</a> at the bottom of the document or wherever it makes sense. Unfortunately it seems like many designers don't really go for easy and simple.
Plus the "show on scroll up" bars have the advantage of making it easy to access the top navigation without losing your place on the page, which is useful if you just want to open a link from the top bar in a new tab or quickly check your notifications or something.
In this case, I am utterly indifferent to Stack Overflow's being fixed. At least it's not going to surprise me.
Absolutely not. Bloomberg does this; it just means the "scroll up" feature is broken. You try to scroll up, and you get the navbar instead of the text you were trying to scroll to. If you're trying to add a feature that infuriates visitors several times over for every page of yours they view, then sure. If you don't want that, don't have stealth navbars.
Now there's just a bar I'm ignoring that's obscuring part of the useful information.
>“When I come here I’m on a mission; I don’t care about the rest.”
>“You’re only there for 1 reason: to find the answer to your question.”
>“From my point of view, nothing above the question title exists.”
>“I scroll down and read the question.”
People google a question, click on a Stack Overflow link, get their answer, close the tab. It works perfectly. Just not for SO, who want you to stay on the site after learning the answer.
The whole blog post is Stack Overflow trying to justify them making the UX worse on purpose.
You can't hold it against them that they want people to actually use their site.
I do think if you take a step back and squint a little bit you can sense their design lacks a bit of contrast, but the black header bar is an ugly fix.
But now it's still there :)
> A/B Test with 10% of Registered Users with Less than 500 Rep
These headlines are the biggest lessons for devs in this article. I cannot stress how valuable these anonymous, code-regulated tests are. Once your site has reached any appreciable traffic size, invest some time into how you can segment users for testing feature updates.
While we like to think all new features/updates are positive, the reality is rarely so positive. Anonymous tests are a great way to improve your feature offering without sacrificing the experience of all users.
A. Alienated any non left or non-US members
B. Used their position to break their own rules
C. Told the community that they would do A and B again
In the process they alienated a lot of high rep users who are slowly leaving the site. Myself included, who had my 20k+ account deleted.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-...
> Myself included, who had my 20k+ account deleted.
What reason did they give for deleting your account?
Where's the original statement?
And I requested an account deletion, and from what I can tell I wasn't the only one.
The bar obscures text on consecutive pages.
This is an issue for Quora as well.
It's nice to read about the design decisions that go into a large successful site.
I initially came here to say that I also prefer the new design but would appreciate something non-fixed. I realize there's a setting for it but that means I have to login just to get rid of it. Like most people I only read the site. Then I sort of got stuck on the sentence in the article that suggested I might be missing out on some of the things that Stackoverflow has to offer.
I believe I have fairly common workflow. I Google, read the question and all the responses, then open all the referenced questions in new tabs and recursively work my way through them until I have exhausted all the material on the topic. You seem to be very familiar with that type of workflow. It's even mentioned in the article.
But it's also a bit odd when I think about it. I can't recall that I have ever visited Stackoverflow directly. For some reason I always come from Google. Heck, I even type "stackoverflow" into the Google search bar so that your results will come up on top. That's very different from my normal browsing pattern. Usually I go to a site directly. So why am I doing this and what am I missing out on? I decided to take a tour of your site!
1. The front page isn't very useful to me. I believe you could make an argument that it's not very useful to most people. It displays the new top navigation bar, a large sign inviting me to sign up, lots of low quality questions in wildly different areas less than a minute old. Maybe this is useful to someone else. To me it's about as useful as if Google would show the 10 most recently indexed sites on their landing page.
2. The top navigation bar didn't really seem to have anything interesting until it struck me that I always search your site with Google. But there is a search feature somewhere... Why is the search bar so small? Why isn't it more prominent? Oh, and it's possible to browse for more interesting topics using tags. I do that sometimes. Why don't I do that more often? Also I should contribute more to Stackoverflow. Why don't I do that?
...
So if you want to change my behavior to be someone who goes to your landing page, searches using your search feature, browses by categories, and monitors familiar topics - then I suggest you try some of the following things:
1. Make searching and browsing topics the focus of the landing page. (The Google search bar isn't "hidden" in the top navigation)
2. Remember which topics I'm interested in without requiring me to login.
3. Change the font on Windows to Segoe UI. ;-)
4. Change the header to be non-fixed without requiring me to login.
Currently you're just a place where the search results are stored. But I have a hunch that if I'm actively coming to your site and using your services, then I would be more likely to register, login and participate. It would perhaps strengthen my impression of a community. I make no guarantee that my suggestions will work but you could A/B test it using the method described in the article. :)
Thank you for Stackoverflow and keep up the good work!
.so-header {
position: static !important;
min-width: 1090px !important;
box-shadow: none !important;
}Site works fine in the latest Stable and Developer Editions.