
How Quora Onboards New Users - thiele
http://www.useronboard.com/how-quora-onboards-new-users/
======
interstitial
Onboarded is a euphemism. Quora belongs at #1 on the dark patterns sites, and
I wish google would allow me to ban it from search results.

~~~
augustocallejas
I remembered Google had an option to block certain domains from your search
results, but that feature was removed last year:

[http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/03/google-discontinues-site-
bl...](http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/03/google-discontinues-site-blocking-
service/)

~~~
interstitial
And if google uses pagerank, and there is no content to link to, how do they
rise so highly?

~~~
pilooch
they certainly open up to googlebots. Human generated content opened to bots
but not to humans. bad SciFi...

~~~
interstitial
The claim they don't open up to googlebots, otherwise they'd be on the wrongs
side of the TOS and get banned.

------
brianchu
Despite all the really negative comments (and yes, I agree that Quora
shouldn't hide its great content from guests), Quora is fairly valuable for
me. I spend more time on Quora than I do on Facebook or Twitter; the only site
I spend more time on is HN.

The reason is that Quora has a lot of really reputable, valuable, and domain-
specific contributors, and it's easy to identify answers from people who have
credibility on a subject. On HN there's a lot of noise, and there's a really
common phenomenon of people bullshitting about subjects where they really have
no credibility (usually the most controversial topics on HN like politics,
economics, venture capital). The same is true for Quora, but on Quora you can
identify people's domain-expertise better (it's posted next to each answer),
and the best contributions percolate to the top much better than on HN. It's
interesting to note that one thing people have always wanted on HN is the
ability to follow certain users and certain topics, which is something Quora
does.

For just the startup/tech world, there are tons of contributions from
experienced VCs, angel investors, experienced entrepreneurs, etc. Outside of
tech, you get pleasant surprises like former police officers answering
questions about policing, movie directors answering questions about movies
they've directed, etc.

Quora is still young, so there are a lot of quality early adopters. Going
forward, it remains to be seen whether the quality will degrade as Quora gets
more popular.

The biggest problem with the onboarding is that most of my value is through
following "famous" (credible) people, I get very little value from following
topics or questions, because when you start doing that you get lot's of noise
(random or semi-credible people answering). This doesn't seem to be something
emphasized in the current flow.

EDIT (reply to below): There's a lot of noise. There are a lot of gems, too,
but it's easier to identify the gems. I don't think of things in terms of
inside vs. outside the so-called SV bubble, so I don't really share that
sentiment. An experienced entrepreneur is still credible to me, even if they
are in SV.

~~~
teh_klev
"Quora has a lot of really reputable, valuable, and domain-specific
contributors, and it's easy to identify answers from people who have
credibility on a subject"

I haven't been back to Quora for a couple of years, but there seemed to be a
lot of astro-turfing by people who self-appointed themselves as "credible
people". I also found that it was difficult to discover interesting content by
genuine experts who exist outside of the "valley" VC/entrepreneurial bubble.

~~~
jessedhillon
Yes, I really find this to be the issue with Quora. It's great branding about
the wisdom of the crowds, thought leaders and what not. But really when all
you have are a bunch of subjective questions/answers that people vote up, what
else do you expect to happen except the one with most broad and popular appeal
goes to the top. That's not the truth, that's a popularity contest. It's the
same thing you have with the news -- reading it feels informative, until you
see them horribly screw up something you know very well, and everybody laps it
up mindlessly. Once you see that happen, you can't trust anything you read
there.

------
Whitespace
I'm not sure if the author is trolling, but that's probably because I've been
extremely livid at Quora for the past couple of days. I had an account from
years ago, but now I can't do a single thing unless I follow 5 topics. I can't
even read the first answer like an anonymous user can, and I can't access my
profile page to delete my account. The only option I have is to go into
developer tools and delete the modal from the DOM when I get linked to a
question.

You can roll your eyes at me all you want, but I'm bring cantankerous for a
reason: I have had an account for years and they locked me out, and I find
that really rather offensive. I now have a worse experience than an anonymous
user, which is just silly.

~~~
samuelhulick
I'm the author, and I definitely wasn't intending to troll - I'm just
documenting the experience and sharing my takeaways, with as little judgement
as possible.

Personally speaking, I'm also not a fan of dark UX patterns and such, and have
found myself frustrated with their UI decisions at times, as well.

------
teh_klev
I dislike Quora for a number of reasons, many of which are described in that
presentation:

1\. Quora make it hard to begin accessing content when arriving from Google
search results for the first time.

2\. Seems to be filled with pointless echo chamber people like Scoble and
cliques of so called "thought leaders"....I have a hard time understanding the
point of Robert Scoble and self-appointed "thought leaders". I hate to use the
term, but there's a lot of "circle jerking" going on in Quora with "famous
people".

3\. Even when I did sign up with a throwaway account, everything about their
navigation and page layout is hard. Questions and answers are jammed into a
narrow sliver of content area. On a 24" 1920x1200, with a browser window
occupying just half that width, it looks crap.

4\. When I last used Quora (about two years ago) it was hard to just randomly
leap around looking for interesting content. there didn't seem to be a 10000
foot view of what I can look at and randomly dip into.

5\. Dark patterns.

But then I was spoiled by Stack Overflow which allows me instant access to
content which is well laid out and easy to comprehend and consume. Yes, SO may
have 6.5 million+ questions, but their tagging feature alone (including tag
synonyms) makes it a piece of cake to see just the stuff I want to see, but
also hop around. I truly hope SE's philosophy of zero friction user
onboarding, easy access to content and sensible moderation constraints burn
Quora.

I short, I just can't bring myself to use Quora, I really did want to, I truly
did, but everything about the way they operate is hostile/icky. As someone
who, after suffering years of internet loonies (on usenet, mailing lists,
phpBB), and can appreciate the need for well managed and curated content, and
constructive and intelligent discourse, I find Quora has failed to engage me
on so many levels.

I also don't know a single person in my circle of close and near friends who
bother with Quora (both technical and non-technical clever, and internet savvy
people). They too are fatigued with the whole "gotta sign up to see our
content" thing.

Quora isn't any better than Experts Exchange which I stopped using even before
SO came on the scene back in 2008. It's just a high-falutin' incarnation of
EE, I truly hope Quora fails.

~~~
Aloisius
_3\. Even when I did sign up with a throwaway account, everything about their
navigation and page layout is hard. Questions and answers are jammed into a
narrow sliver of content area. On a 24 " 1920x1200, with a browser window
occupying just half that width, it looks crap._

...

 _But then I was spoiled by Stack Overflow which allows me instant access to
content which is well laid out and easy to comprehend and consume._

I would point out that Stack Overflow also has a fixed-size content area. It
is a bit bigger (660 px vs. 485 px), but at 1920x1200, you're looking at 25%
vs. 34% of the screen for the Q&A which will look rather empty. Plus the font
size is actually larger on Stack Overflow so the information density is
probably about the same.

I rarely go to Quora myself, but it has nothing to do with stylistic choices.

~~~
teh_klev
Yes agree mostly, but somehow SO's layout hits my visual comprehension
sweetspot pretty good. I guess my only complaint would be this which I raised
a while back, but was poo-poo'd:

[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/93457/419](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/93457/419)

That said, like yourself, I also avoid Quora for reasons other than just
stylistic choices.

------
majani
With nearly 5 years under its belt, zero revenue, grossly overvalued at 400m$,
new blog features backfiring, silly registration tactics, I see no reason why
people should bother to cover this product. Its got nothing going for it at
the moment.

~~~
fchollet
400M USD would be 1k USD per monthly US visitor. [1]

[1] [https://www.quantcast.com/quora.com](https://www.quantcast.com/quora.com)

------
sergiotapia
I'd rank Quora up there with experts exchange - scumbag website with a very
slimy feel to it.

------
nacs
Weird that they use this as Quora's 'onboarding'. I bet they get most of their
signups/onboarding from the annoying SEO spam they have with the "signup to
see more than the first answer (or close this annoying popup box to see that
magical first answer)" popup.

Google needs to give the entire Quora site a large negative ranking Rapgenius-
style.

For those that haven't seen it:
[http://i.imgur.com/vbLTXYz.png](http://i.imgur.com/vbLTXYz.png)

~~~
samuelhulick
I'm the one who put the teardown together, and I actually completely agree
with you - I think it's pretty unlikely that the majority of their signups
would actually come from their home page. I thought it was an interesting flow
nonetheless and thought I'd document/share.

~~~
rhubarbcustard
That's a really helpful site, thanks for putting it together! It'll help me
enormously with optimizing my own site's signup flow.

~~~
samuelhulick
It never gets old to hear that it's helpful - thanks for letting me know!

------
chaz
These teardowns are great -- thanks to the author for doing them.

Onboarding is so important to breaking the ice with users, and providing with
a clear sense of what to do after they register. They got sold about some
value proposition before they registered, and chances are they probably need
to do some work before they start seeing that value: adding friends,
installing a client, setting preferences, etc.

Users need their hand held in those first few screens. It's easy to get tunnel
vision about a product when you've been building a product for weeks, and
obvious steps don't seem so obvious to fresh eyes. Asking strangers to sit
down and complete tasks while you watch is one of the best learning
experiences you can have about your own product.

I learned the hard way a few times when I got registrations and no repeat
visits. I was able to cut it significantly by guiding users on what to do next
(I took some lessons from Twitter's onboarding), and following up via auto
email if they still didn't get started. Copy made a big difference, too.

~~~
samuelhulick
Thanks for saying so! (I'm the author)

Also, 100% agreed on all the point you make. That's not far from being a blog
post unto itself!

------
mercnet
I became a user when this site taught me to append ?share=1 to the URL to
access the content.

~~~
essayist
This is great - thanks. Though the site is still annoying.

------
ivanbrussik
As a user, I find Quora to be weird and confusing. The sign up process was
like a labyrinth, and trying to figure out how to use it is quite cumbersome.

------
siegecraft
I know this isn't exclusive to quora, but I really hate the "follow X
topics/people/tags/boards that you probably don't even care about but we're
going to force you to before we'll let you really use the app so our numbers
look good" pattern.

~~~
james33
That is a quite essential step for something like this. Take for example
Twitter. If you signup for Twitter and don't follow anyone, it is going to be
a pretty useless service to you. Same thing with Quora and many others, you
need to have a starting point to see the value and start actually using it.

~~~
natejenkins
I might be a special case but I signed up for Twitter just so I could keep an
eye on who is tweeting about my company and make an occasional reply. I don't
follow anybody and wouldn't have finished the signup process if I was forced
to follow someone. I find it a pretty great solution for real-time customer
service, both as a founder and as a customer, but I don't want to hear
everything anyone has to say unless they're a good friend of mine and in that
case they are on Facebook. For notable people, if I care at all what they have
been up to I will go to their blog, and for a real-time event I will simply
search for it on Twitter.

The awesome thing about Twitter is they let me use their service exactly how I
want to and don't force me to do anything else, like randomly click 5 topics I
couldn't care less about. I wish Quora were similar in that respect.

~~~
james33
Is there a Quora use-case I'm missing? What is the scenario where you wouldn't
want to follow topics on Quora? Granted, I haven't been on Quora much over the
last year, so things could have changed.

~~~
samuelhulick
I think the issue people are encountering is trying to read an article linked
from elsewhere (e.g. Twitter) and having to go through the full onboarding
process to read it.

------
piyush_soni
Is anyone else having trouble reading the linked article or seeing the slides?
I see page number 1/58 and the first slide is visible, I press the 'next'
arrows and then everything is blank - just the page numbers change. I tried in
both FF/Chrome.

~~~
samuelhulick
I'm sorry to hear it's not working for you - would you care to reach out to me
on Twitter at @UserOnboard and try to troubleshoot it in realtime?

~~~
piyush_soni
Aah. Got it. The first image you've posted in the slideshow is hosted on
amazon AWS, and all the other on google drive, which is blocked in my office.
So your blog won't work in many offices.

~~~
samuelhulick
I had no idea google drive was often blocked - thanks for letting me know!

~~~
piyush_soni
Yeah. I know it's weird. They block Google Drive (and all other drive/sync
software like Dropbox, Skydrive, Box.net client etc.) but not Gmail.

------
octatone2
Just this past weekend I clicked a google link to Quora and there were so many
steps trying to get to the discussion and answer that I ultimately just closed
the tab and went on to another search result. Horrible "onboarding"
experience.

------
guptaneil
Wow, the quality of teardowns is great! Is there an RSS feed I can follow? I'd
rather not sign up for emails.

~~~
samuelhulick
I'm glad to hear you like it! This is kind of a side project for me, and I
haven't heard too much of a need for RSS, so I haven't set that up yet. I
tweet all of the teardowns on Twitter at @UserOnboard, though.

~~~
eieio
I just want to echo how cool of a site this is. I'm actually not a designer at
all(far from it, I do entirely backend work) but I've gone through most of
your teardowns just because they're interesting to read and it's cool to learn
about UX stuff like this.

The only comment I'd have is that I found the "zoom in on mouseover" to
actually be really confusing at first, and I don't really get any utility from
it. I suspect this is because I'm primarily interesting in what you have to
say about the site, and not the zoomed-in details of a particular page.

Thanks for the site!

~~~
samuelhulick
Thanks for the feedback! The zoom tool just went out last night, and I don't
think it's completely "there" yet. As a (former) developer myself, I'm really
glad to hear it's interesting to non-designers, too!

------
jccalhoun
so pretty much everything this person said was great is why i hate quora.

------
r0h1n
I am a Quora member, but never ever read the site logged in. Instead I just
suffix "?share=1". There's something about blurred content that requires me to
'unlock' it that just puts me off. Maybe it's the memory of Expert's Exchange.

~~~
camus2
me too, registered , logged once, got spammed,blocked it ,never returned on
Quora. It could have been an interesting app, but they blew it for reasons i
fail to understand.

------
goldvine
How the heck do any of these comments have anything to do with the linked
piece?

Samuel, great stuff. Another solid teardown!

~~~
samuelhulick
Haha, thanks for saying so! (the "great stuff" part)

------
thupten
can somebody tell me what quora.com is? is it like stackoverflow.com for
programming only or for everything like yahoo answers? I don't want to sign up
to find out. :)

~~~
username223
As belluchan said, "as a scummy, low-quality content farm."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7106091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7106091)

Which, I suppose, makes this site a "scummy, low-quality content farm farm."

------
joyofdata
Quora is suffering badly from questions like:

1) "What was the most awesome thing a teacher ever told you?"

2) "Is coffee bad for you?"

3) "What is it like to live in Berlin?" ...

and so on.

The answers are usually very shallow essays instead of to the point, clear and
competent answers. The search facilities on Quora are super-bad - it is
virtually impossible to find something on there. The voting is as already
mentioned a popularity contest.

In my opinion each end every Stackexchange web-site is more useful and
(intellectually) entertaining than Quora which is indeed nothing else than a
highbrow Yahoo! Answers.

------
junto
Ssssshhh....

[http://anyurl.quora.com/?share=1](http://anyurl.quora.com/?share=1)

------
hydralist
how the hell does quora plan on making money

~~~
belluchan
It's a content site, so probably from pageviews with ads. I doubt Quora is
going to stick around, and if it does it will be in there with about.com, ehow
and the like. A scummy low quality crowd sourced content farm.

