
Early Quora Design Notes - hugoahlberg
http://www.artypapers.com/ap.log/thread.php?346
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mrspeaker
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."

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justin_vanw
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.

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

~~~
freddier
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.

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yarone
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.

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ryanglasgow
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.

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emeltzer
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.

~~~
joshhepworth
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.

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rdl
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.

~~~
jdp23
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.

~~~
gojomo
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.

~~~
jdp23
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.

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danilocampos
(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.

~~~
jdp23
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."

~~~
danilocampos
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.

~~~
jdp23
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').

~~~
danilocampos
> 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.

~~~
jdp23
Agreed. This post is from January 2010 and she had been there for six months.
When did they start?

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smartydrapers
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://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-questions/)

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090063125853764.html)

~~~
antidaily
You created a fake account just to attack her?

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JCB_K
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?

~~~
Tycho
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?

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mattmanser
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?

~~~
ryanglasgow
The designer is a she, Rebekah Cox.

~~~
mattmanser
Whoops!

