Early Quora Design Notes | Hacker News Reader

Early Quora Design Notes

artypapers.com

55 pointshugoahlberg31 comments

I just read this after reading the "Making Crash Bandicoot" article. The contrast really highlights how mind-numbingly boring website architecture is. I gotta get into game dev!

Quora: "So, the blue buttons are meant to reflect the blue links. Green buttons are for simple inline interactions. Grey buttons are for the least important and ancillary items. (The application of these rules isn't entirely consistent because of constant, rapid iteration.) Red is used for the logo in order to help it to really stand out from the other surrounding elements."

Crash Bandicoot: "Red, for example, tends to bleed horribly on old televisions. At the time, everyone had old televisions, even if they were new! Crash was orange because that was available. There are no lava levels, a staple in character action games, because Crash is orange. We made one in Demo, and that ended the lava debate. It was not terribly dissimilar to trying to watch a black dog run in the yard on a moonless night."

How is someone at Quora giving a retrospective like this? I personally don't see that the UI is so compelling or remarkable, and the site itself is a very fancy bbs.

I don't get it.

On one hand the UI doesn't seem remarkable. On the other hand, neither does Craigslist, Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Facebook....

You're right about Craigslist and maybe Zappos, but Facebook won, among other things, for being the first truly usable, non-hideous social network. And they keep creating new UX elements.

Amazon has so many remarkable UI inventions that they patented some (not that I agree with that).

eBay has pioneered a lot of UI innovation as well.

Usability and UX invention is in the core of this 3 companies.

I'm actually surprised to read so many non positive comments. I am really impressed by Quora's design (and some of the thinking process mentioned in this article) and here's why:

Its not about the graphic design (pretty colors, nice images, etc), it's about the product design. Which features to include, which to exclude, in order to create a system that generates the desired behavior out of your users.

The problem is that Quora's design is not aligned with the companies motives:

"Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question." - from Quora's About page

A Question and it's related answers can be archivable (Who invented the atomic bomb?), temporal (What is the current status of Zynga's zLive?), or anywhere in between (Who is the lead UI designer for Mac OS X?). The design is ONLY composed of real-time design patterns, mostly taken from Facebook and Twitter: mandatory account registration, asymmetrical following, news feed, real-time notifications, user messaging system, etc.

There is NO focus on archivable questions. The website is based around questions and answers happening right now, which isn't what Q/A is all about.

Hmm. There's something appealing about tweaking a bunch of fairly mundane parameters (button color, for example) in order to more effectively allow people to come together and make something interesting with your site.

It might not be as interesting on face as game design, but it can be really rewarding when you get it right.

edit: and quora is an example of extreme attention to detail enabling a really great site to flourish.

It really is amazing how much making sure the little things are right can help. I think it helps develop a slightly more emotional connection for the user as they find themselves subconsciously enjoying various elements that the designer/developer took the time to polish.

To that effect, http://littlebigdetails.com/, is a great list of 'little things' that can be great for inspiration / a list of innovations. Quora is on this list for a few elements.

Quora has evolved in a lot of ways since this (a year ago?), but remains one of the cleanest and best realtime UI/UX I've seen.

The biggest flaw seems to be that if you're not already very familiar with how FB, other near-realtime UIs, etc. work, the Quora UI is somewhat difficult to understand. It's definitely built for "power users" at the cost of being obvious to some new users.

The key thing to understand is that for the casual user, contact with the site is probably via a direct google result or link to a specific question or answer. The "related questions" and search box are really the key elements for that user as far as navigation; everything else is on-page.

Users who "live in Quora" creating content are pretty happy with the quora UI as it is; I find it frustrating on other websites when things don't behave the same way.

They may need to work on a better process for going from casual visitor to actual user, but there are a lot of policy and content-quality issues to address as well. Having a slightly difficult to use UI might actually be somewhat intentional.

If it's so hard for casual and new user, how good is it? As well as the confusing search/post box (which leads to a lot of questions getting posted by mistake), there's also the lack of categories when you create a question (which leads to a lot of orphaned questions) and the way you have to do a lot of editing of tweets to get them to be useful. Plus there's no way to move an answer to be a comment, so when people make a mistake it's a pain to recover. etc. Maybe it's all intentional to keep people out but with everybody highlighting how their business challenge is to attract users who aren't techies, that doesn't seem like the right approach to me.

What if Quora doesn't yet want/need casual users who are unfamiliar with their central social (voting/tagging/following/constrained-searching) mechanisms?

Also, familiar/orderly interactions are hard to iterate rapidly: expectations are already set. Throwing new ideas out there, and seeing if people figure them out (or use them in unexpected ways) generates more knowledge and upside potential.

The mainstream will be trained-up on these interactions, by lots of other sites which settle on the same winning arrangements, in a couple years. Then, Quora will seem familiar.

Well, their CEO has been telling people since November (if not longer) that their challenge is to broaden their user base, so that's the metric they're being judged by. And it's possible that all the other sites will also settle on the same "winning" arrangement of not wanting/needing casual users but they shouldn't count on it.

(Disclaimer: I gave up on Quora months ago – maybe they've fixed these things)

I desperately wish I could effectively convey how bad I think Quora's implementation is. I'll try now. The visual design is simple, if bland, but that's not my beef. Simple is usually good.

I think it mostly hinges around discovery and sense of place. On Quora, it never feels like you are anywhere. No sense of hierarchy, no sense of order. Quora is a massive sense of limbo. It's really weird.

More than that, because of the myriad subjects under discussion, and the wholly opaque mechanisms for discovering them, it constantly feels as though there are places in Quora you're shut out of, without a clear path to get there. So, I don't feel like I'm anywhere, while it feels like there are elsewheres I could be. It's too clever by half, trying to intelligently curate what a given user will want to see, but ending up leaving the user in a state of helplessness.

There's also this bizarre conception of having to follow a topic in order consume it. Commitment before preview? Really? At least I think that's how it works. I mean, it's too confusing, too complicated for how simple the problem is.

Contrast this with Convore, which gives you:

- Discussions your friends have joined - Bigass list of all discussions - Discussions by category - Discussion search

Quora has the benefit of founders with a solid network, so the early adopters are heavy hitters with interesting things to say. It's a shame, then, that the user experience is just so... tepid.

The tepidness is a direct result of the approach they took: "Really early on I decided to focus only on the product design and would forgo any time spent on things like visual design and, to some extent, branding."

Hmm, but none of the tepidness is a result of the visual design. craigslist continues to look like shit but it works well. Quora doesn't.

It's just bad product design, poor user experience, whatever you want to call it. These issues are structural, not visual or aesthetic. Slapping on a new paint job whenever they get around to it isn't going to fix the problem.

It's a classic engineer's special, and that quote is a rationalization for this truth.

At least to me, it's a poor user experience ''and'' a tepid visual design. Incorporating visual design and branding from the beginning certainly would have helped address the tepidness, and might have helped with usability as well (unless they were consciously trying to brand it has 'intimidating to newcomers').

> unless they were consciously trying to brand it has 'intimidating to newcomers')

Haha, sure, that's true enough. I firmly believe that design isn't just something you can do at the end. Design has to happen from the ground up. Having a competent designer involved with real veto power might have helped to get some usable organization of content in there.

Agreed. This post is from January 2010 and she had been there for six months. When did they start?

Quora has the benefit of founders with a solid network, so the early adopters are heavy hitters with interesting things to say. It's a shame, then, that the user experience is just so... tepid.

I'm not really qualified to comment, as I've only encountered Quora via deep links, and sometimes some additional clicking around. But the above summarizes my impression, both from my own limited interaction and from the limited amount of "the buzz" [1] that enters my personal world. Quora became the next cool, limited, (temporarily?) high S/N place to be, after the previous one became too noisy.

1 Oops, no pun intended. Although, OT, I have been wondering whether Buzz is going to "make it", longer term, or whether it's already on or being considered for a near term hit list (e.g. Wave's fate (but without an open source spinoff that I can imagine)).

Yes exactly, the next Friendfeed / Buzz where the elites can hang out before the masses get there.

Having it look different to every user, with no 'canonical' view or hierarchy, is an actual design tactic, inherited from Facebook, which makes the site more inviting to certain kinds of exploration and growth.

Facebook does have a very clear, distinct hierarchy. It's user centric, and oriented around relationships.

-Homepage: Big wall of stuff

--User page, another wall

---Info

---Pictures

--Your profile

---Pictures

etc

At no point do ever look around in Facebook and think "where am I? How do I go somewhere else?" Other users exist on Facebook. Discovering them is straightforward. If I want more friends, I know how to get them.

Tailoring the experience to your personal profile is the correct choice. Quora just isn't doing it correctly. What you're saying makes a lot of sense, though, in that Quora is treating questions and topics like people. It seems like using a screwdriver to make an omelet.

It's amazing how many web ui's fail at navigation hierarchy when its a solved problem (see Apple UIs like the Finder, iPhone and iPad).

Why does everyone hang on Rebekah's every word? Quora has incredible engineering talent, but design remains a weakness that clearly hinders growth of the business:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...

You created a fake account just to attack her?

What I think is funny about Quora, is that the idea is absolutely not new: there's loads of similar websites online like it. (Yahoo Answers et al). Still there's a big buzz around it. Fair enough, the UI is a lot better than on those other websites, but that doesn't make it that special. Or am I missing something?

Its the users. Quora started out as an invite system, so as invites percolated outward from the founders, many Silicon Valley technologists and their friends came into the fold and sort of defined its current culture. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand is full of, well, Yahoo users, and its culture is literally a joke: http://www.epicfail.com/tag/yahoo-answers/

It's a total mystery to me too. I can see the argument that he people/culture make it special, but why would those people go there in the first place? Is this just like when someone opens a new bar or nightclub and for a while it's 'the place to be' ? Are there any distinguishing features at all?

To be honest for a long time I thought Quora was a stack exchange site with a different skin; I only ever saw the q&a pages.

In the article he actually says he took 3 months to get the q&a page design done, interesting that they ended up with a design for that page that is so uncannily similar to SO's.

I appreciate that the reward mechanism is different and I can't comment on the home page as it is behind a signup page, but still, they seriously had never seen SO even in June 2009? Not even a little bit of influence there?

The designer is a she, Rebekah Cox.

Whoops!

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