My first impression - A new user's feedback

Hi all, here's a quick post sharing my very first impression on the site, while it's fresh in my head (ca. 24h since sign up). I sorted the items from top (felt important to me) to bottom:

1. I miss the green number when you earned reputation (yes, I'm serious, the dopamine hit is real)
2. The buttons in the top bar behave a bit counter intuitive
3. The "Ask question" on-boarding sets expectations way more clearly than on SO
4. Comments have threads and are hidden by default
5. Switching communities is more clear, but couldn't find "our communities" or "recent communities"
6. Inline code has no grey background (I'm used to this from every other site that comes to my mind: Github, GitLab, SO, Discourse)

Going into a little more detail on 2., 3., 4 and 5.:

2. The top bar's grey icons on Stackoverflow are easy to understand: they open a small on screen dialog. If you click on anything in that dialog, you're taken to a new site. Only exceptions are the profile page and the home page, which both are colored instead of grey. Here, it's more confusing: Users, Help and Dashboard all take you to another site. Also, having a pretty big Sign out button directly on every page is an unconventional choice. I think it's fine, to click once on "Account" or something similar, to reach a sign out. In the picture, links are marked green, "buttons that open pop up" (not sure what's the name, anyone feel free to edit) are marked red. To me it looks inconsistent and I was surprised by the small grey boxes leaving the current site.

   

3. I liked the dragon exercise; it playfully shows you what's expected of a question. This is a very welcome contrast to SO, which basically conveys the feeling "heeeyy everything goes, just post whatever you want". I think yours could become a bit shorter, but no concrete ideas yet. In general, I think there's a lot of potential here, because you're not as driven by usage metrics compared to SO. So there's a chance to do actual on-boarding.

4. The huge new comments with hidden timestamps were the straw that made me sign up here. I love that comments are threaded. Hiding the thread is a sane option, but personally I like SO's old approach more: display them in a small font and start hiding, when there are more than X comments. That way you can still skim short discussions, without having to click "expand".

5. There are not too many communities currently, so the selector in the top bar works okay. However, you have to scroll a little. I think sorting the communities by "last visited" or by the reputation the user has on each would be helpful.

Last but not least, I received very friendly support by Art and Monica when I had issues signing up. The personal touch made me even more eager to stay.

Hope this helps, I didn't find posts mentioning most of this with a quick search here on meta.

posted 2 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

2mo ago by Michael‭

Mo_‭

61 reputation 1 1 11 0