In approximately inverse order of importance (sorry about that):
* Misc.:
- Don't like using my Facebook account.
* UI:
- Always find myself hunting for the "follow" button.
- Front page is a visually undifferentiated mishmash of 20ish different questions, most of which contain no more than a few sentences of content. Also: do we really need number of answers, number of topics, follow, star, time, topics (selected arbitrarily?), profile picture, answer snippet, answerer name, answerer description, and answer votes for every single one of these questions? You're making me sort through way too much stuff to decide whether I'm interested in the question or not.
- The options menu is cryptic and poorly located. Ex.: If I want to answer something anonymously, why do I go hunting at the right-hand side of the screen by all the navigational / related links stuff? Put that by the text box.
* Community:
- The personality types on the site are not substantially different from people I already know. Most of the questions (both from my feed and via "All Questions") drip Silicon Valley techie. I'd love to see intelligent questions/answers from people who have lives very different from mine. As things stand, I'm not sure whether, if I were to ask a question, I'd be getting a range of opinions or an echo chamber.
- Answers tend pithy. On the other hand, some of the questions encourage that. Is there some way to see only questions/answers with meat?
Summary: Right now I feel like Quora has a lot of features (too many features) and not enough content, even in what look to be active topics. I don't know how you get people to invest in writing high-quality answers, but that's the question you really need to be focusing on. I would say that you should try to to cultivate a sense of sitewide community, but the siloing of the site into a bunch of semi-intersecting topics could make that tricky.
But then, the only Q&A site I've ever really liked has been Ask Metafilter, so maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing here -- but I don't think so, since, for me, it's the first site that comes to mind when I think of your mission. (Put together a better-indexed version of Ask Metafilter and you'll have a winner in my book.) If I need to ask a short question that can be answered quickly, I'll consider Quora. If I'm looking for significant thought, longer meditations, a diverse range of opinions, or interesting browsing material, though, I'll head elsewhere.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One thing we do need to work on for sure is making the good content that is already on the site get surfaced better.
* Misc.:
- Don't like using my Facebook account.
* UI:
- Always find myself hunting for the "follow" button.
- Front page is a visually undifferentiated mishmash of 20ish different questions, most of which contain no more than a few sentences of content. Also: do we really need number of answers, number of topics, follow, star, time, topics (selected arbitrarily?), profile picture, answer snippet, answerer name, answerer description, and answer votes for every single one of these questions? You're making me sort through way too much stuff to decide whether I'm interested in the question or not.
- The options menu is cryptic and poorly located. Ex.: If I want to answer something anonymously, why do I go hunting at the right-hand side of the screen by all the navigational / related links stuff? Put that by the text box.
* Community:
- The personality types on the site are not substantially different from people I already know. Most of the questions (both from my feed and via "All Questions") drip Silicon Valley techie. I'd love to see intelligent questions/answers from people who have lives very different from mine. As things stand, I'm not sure whether, if I were to ask a question, I'd be getting a range of opinions or an echo chamber.
- Answers tend pithy. On the other hand, some of the questions encourage that. Is there some way to see only questions/answers with meat?
Summary: Right now I feel like Quora has a lot of features (too many features) and not enough content, even in what look to be active topics. I don't know how you get people to invest in writing high-quality answers, but that's the question you really need to be focusing on. I would say that you should try to to cultivate a sense of sitewide community, but the siloing of the site into a bunch of semi-intersecting topics could make that tricky.
But then, the only Q&A site I've ever really liked has been Ask Metafilter, so maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing here -- but I don't think so, since, for me, it's the first site that comes to mind when I think of your mission. (Put together a better-indexed version of Ask Metafilter and you'll have a winner in my book.) If I need to ask a short question that can be answered quickly, I'll consider Quora. If I'm looking for significant thought, longer meditations, a diverse range of opinions, or interesting browsing material, though, I'll head elsewhere.