Iterating on Beta design

The "new" design still confuses comments and answers; these, as we keep on telling you, are different. I scan that image and I see an answer that reads

Cool command. Is there a difference between break after a commit and edit on that commit?

That is not an answer, but it's just as prominent. Comments need to be 2nd class citizens, and they need to continue to exist post release on answers AND questions. This is a fundamental part of the site.

If you view the question you screenshot in the "classic site" (sans adverts, and some other awful features) you can clearly see two comments missing on the question, and the comments are significantly less prominent. That is by design.

There is no way for users to ask for someone to provide clarity to their question at the moment (answers should not ask for clarification, we have an entire flag for that), which is a serious problem; questions lacking clarity can't be answered, can't be commented, and can't be closed... That's just an awful UX for all involved. This iterated version still destroys the site.

You seem to have misunderstood or are not hearing what we've been telling you.

Answers need to be separated from comments!

Comments must be available for questions too!

The post's score needs to be in a prominent place aligned with the top of the post! You can have the vote buttons below, but put the score back where it was.

Don't give any prominence to the post's author. Put their name at the bottom and in small text with small image.

While many of you appreciate the cleaner aesthetic, one piece of feedback has been loud and clear: the new question page is difficult to scan

Is this seriously all you've gotten out of our feedback. How about the major and near unanimous opposition to your removal of review queues, close votes, and flags?

Also, who is the "many of you" who appreciate anything about this. Last I checked, more than 96% of people downvoted the initial beta announcement.

Specifically, users are finding it hard to discern where one response ends and the next begins.

This is because of how you place ads and how you style comments. If you place ads between the title and body of a question, of course that makes it harder to discern they are part of the same post. But I doubt that's an accident, or that you will change that back.

Also, comments are not visually different from answers. So its very hard to tell what even is an answer versus a comment, and where an answer and its comments start and end. Comment are second-class citizens and should stay that way, and should not be given anything near the prominence that answers are. But I fear this isn't an accident either, its part of your Redditization of SO.

Furthermore, there is no way to see the comments on questions. They just disappeared. This is not okay. Question comments are necessary.

However, the change that has had the most impact on scanability is the repositioning of the voting buttons from the left side to the bottom of the post.

This isn't just a "scanability" issue. The post's score indicates whether or not the community thinks a post is useful. If the community considers a post to be complete trash, maybe I don't want to read it. If the community considers a post very useful, I'm more likely to trust what it says. Knowing the score without having to read through the whole post first is useful.

The header in your first image says "4 answers", but given the design we've landed on it looks more like 8 answers. Can we instead give answers the authoritative placement on the page they deserve? Comments shouldn't be at the same level of importance as answers.

...designed to prioritize a human-first hierarchy.

Humans first, ads second, actual content a distant third place. 👍

I already reported this as bug, but mentioning this again because this is still happening in the prototype:

Answers have a "Reply" button instead of "Add a comment"

First answer

Second answer

The term "Reply" is fine for the threaded comments experiment, but only for replying to a comment.

An answer should not have a "Reply" button because Stack Overflow, the Q&A site, is not a discussion forum. Comments are primarily intended to provide feedback and to ask for clarification, not to ask follow-up questions, or other forms of engagement.

If you would like to add discussions, including open-ended-questions, please put them in another place, not in the questions page.

P.S. Remember that nowadays, the chat allows anyone to participate.

References

• Answers have a "Reply" button instead of "Add a comment"
• Stack Overflow chat opening up to all users in January; Stack Exchange chat later

By chance, I tried the new site design for the first time just yesterday. Not hearing about the discussion, I was able to get a genuine first user experience. It was bad - in fact so bad I went to complain about it on MetaSE right away.

When the new site loaded, I was confused: I thought something had failed to load, because at the first glance, the page looked like a stripped-down HTML fallback:

Link to the example - new design

There are barely any design elements, and the visual hierarchy is extremely flat, close to nonexistent. There are almost no colors, not even on the logo, and the main sections - header, question, answers, comments - are barely at all separated. At a glance, the page looks more like a wall of text than a structured discussion.

The answers visually flow into each other to such an extent that, when preparing the screenshot above, I did not initially realize I had captured two separate answers rather than one. The question score is also much less prominent than before, which makes it harder to assess voting state quickly.

For comparison, here is the previous design:

Link to the example - old design

In the earlier version, sections were clearly separated, making it significantly easier to scan and navigate between question, answers, and comments.

I understand that redesigns usually aim for consistency, accessibility, or modernization. However, in its current form, this feels like a huge step back in terms of aesthetics, visual structure, and scannability.

What is the reasoning behind this design direction?
Are further refinements planned to improve visual separation and readability?

Why does only the first answer show the user's reputation and total badges by category? Is this because it's the accepted answer?

First answer

Second answer

Third answer

In addition to the scanability fixes, I’d love to get your input on another new proposal: the visited state for links.

Lovely! I have provided my input in a nice machine-readable format by configuring the VisitedText CSS colour. Use my browser's settings.

Our first option is grey, an incremental, neutral change that adds a new signal via underline to help with scanability, though we’re mindful it may not feel distinct enough in dense lists.

Indeed! Some people may find this works best for them. Use my browser's settings.

The second is blue, which gives a clearer differentiation and aligns with how we use blue to communicate state.

Consistency with the overall design language is, indeed, a worthy goal! However, blue is the colour of unvisited hyperlinks on every other webpage rendered by my browser. For maximum alignment, please use my browser's settings.

Finally we are looking at purple. This is a much louder and more distinct option that certainly helps with differentiation, but we think it risks competing with unvisited links.

This is my preferred option, since it's how I've configured my browser to display visited links on every other website, so my brain can easily process it. But you're right: other people might find it competes visually with unvisited links. That's why you should use my browser's settings.

Please. It's even got a GUI. It integrates with OS themes. It's modern, hip, accessible, I'll describe it however you want. But please: you are making webpages. Hypertext documents. Not posters, not video game UIs: an interactive reference manual / discussion forum / wiki thing. Unless you have a very good reason (which, for this, you don't), don't override my browser's settings. Use them.

Do not argue what colour to paint the bikeshed. There's a perfectly good colour right there, as provided by the user, as configured in the browser's settings. Use it, please.

I already mentioned this before in an answer elsewhere, but that is probably worth reiterating here as a response to an official staff post.

The least we could ask for is, even if you do follow through and graduate this redesign, despite the overwhelmingly negative reception, is that you keep the old interface available long term, like how Reddit keeps old.reddit available, even many years later. Even if you no longer support/update the old design, we would much rather have the old one available as compared to not at all.

I greatly prefer the old interface, and based on the reception of the official posts announcing the new design, the overwhelming majority of voters feel the same. Removing the old interface would be a huge blow to this community.

And just as a side note, the redesign looks too much like Reddit, and if I wanted an interface that looks like Reddit, I would just go there instead. Between this and the threaded replies instead of proper answers, stop trying to be Reddit 2.0.

However, the change that has had the most impact on scanability is the repositioning of the voting buttons from the left side to the bottom of the post. While this intended to encourage reading before voting, we recognize that it removed a consistent vertical anchor that our community has used for years to visually separate posts.

It seems you are aiming for completely different use of answers than I do. If I look at question and answers i care for:

• How close is the problem stated in question to problem I am facing
• Which answer is the best solution for the problem.

So I would like to know which answer is the best according to community opinion, and then I want to read it. And you say "please, read the answer before checking if SME find it valuable". What's the point?

I hate this color of green and it looks really weird in darkmode. Also, the previous design had a green that felt rewarding (I'm not sure how to describe this any better) and fit a lot better.

New:

Old:

What about the Ask Question page? I'm asking now because it was announced that the full new experience will launch in April. It looks to me that you don't have enough time.

This page seems complex to me because it will vary depending on whether the user has enabled experiments and on the experience of users asking questions on Stack Overflow, the Q&A site. The page is too complex for a new user, as it requires them to choose the question type and whether to send the question to Staging Ground or the main site.

The guidance included in the Ask Question page is very poor. Probably the major problem is that it doesn't explain the difference between a "Troubleshooting/degugging" question and the other question types. Most of the open-ended-questions that I have observed should have been a "Troubleshooting/degugging" type.

Another big problem is that the guidance says that, to get answers immediately, they should be posted on the main site. This looks bad to me, as many new users struggle to write a good question.

Related

feature-request

• There is no question type in the experimental ask question page that makes sense for requesting help implementing an algorithm in a specific language
• Question types are confusing

Blog

• Your sneak peek at the redesigned Stack Overflow

You have stated that this is not all that you've gotten out of the feedback;

Would you give us a list of things that you are planning to implement and the ones that don't fit in your rearchitecture philosophy?

Below is a snapshot of an "Advice" open-ended-question taken a few moments ago from Beta.

Please note that it includes the same icon used to display the number of answers on "Troubleshooting/debugging" questions, as they are called in the open-ended-questions experiment, and the number 6. The problem is that open-ended-questions doesn't have answers; they have "replies".

Ideally open-ended-questions should be shown in another place, not in the questions page, and they should use a different icon to represent replies, instead of the icon used to represent answers.

In your set of screenshots showing the question title color options, there are different icons for questions with accepted answers, for those without accepted answers, and for open-ended questions, but the differences are very subtle. With the exception of the question having an accepted-answer icon, for me, they are hard to notice because of the icon size.

Related

• Exploring new types of questions on Stack Overflow
• Opinion-based questions alpha experiment on Stack Overflow

Some of my feedback on the new design:

1. Answers and comments need a better visual distinction.

   Take https://beta.stackoverflow.com/q/11227809#11227877, can you tell at a glance what is a comment/answer? I don't and neither will someone scrolling from one answer to the next:

   Also the action bar under answers is missing buttons: the vital functions of flagging and editing.

2. Sidebar

   I like that we have the communities there, we can collapse stuff and that the purple blobs are gone. But do move home & AI assist to content.

More generally speaking could we get a bit more input on the site design from well the users? I made a proposal for graduated sites without designs, perhaps something like this could also be done here?

Couple of thoughts on the sidebar and simplified top bar.

SO classic on the side, Stack Overflow beta in the middle, super user on the right.

Frankly in a perfect world, I'd take the layout/order in super user, Remove AI Assist or push it further down, and add meta after chat.

Now as someone who primarily answered in the past - unanswered would be a good way for me to find things to answer - I see this is missing. . I note both SO Classic and Beta lack this

• Much of the things under content are irrelevant to most folks using a site, day to day. Companies and maybe the blog should go under resources. Meta should go with chat as a integral part of the site.

• Why is 'users' under "Resources?"

Content should aggregate individual site relevant resources. I want the things I use every day front and center.

I realise a lot of folks in the company don't use the sites day to day, or forget people use individual sites outside SO. Anything related to, or used for individual site use should be together.

• I realise companies might provide revenue, but what's the actual usage of the companies link for the average user and what's the value add from having that under content? Its a legacy of the organic/internally run SO Jobs.

• Jobs currently is limited to certain countries -in fact is US only now, and SO inc does have some content, like site sponsorship banners that are geo-specific. Hiding it where irrelevant makes sense. Could this be done?

• 'all communities' is part of the stack exchange branding depreciation I guess but the site switcher covers some of that. How do you see the workflow for the average multi-site or non SO user? What does this offer over an improved site switcher? I do like the idea of being able to 'pin' certain sites to the sidebar (and missed it cause it was in a later screenshot - might be helpful to make 'signed in' UX the primary/first image you share). Is the expectation that a user's on one site, and switches to another site, over using each site individually?

I don't routinely switch between sites - I open new tabs, so having communities on the sidebar has limited value to me (but might be useful for others,)

In addition to the scanability fixes, I’d love to get your input on another new proposal: the visited state for links. We want to make it easier to see where you’ve already been without adding to the visual noise of the thread. We’re looking at three options. Our first option is grey, an incremental, neutral change that adds a new signal via underline to help with scanability, though we’re mindful it may not feel distinct enough in dense lists. The second is blue, which gives a clearer differentiation and aligns with how we use blue to communicate state. Finally we are looking at purple. This is a much louder and more distinct option that certainly helps with differentiation, but we think it risks competing with unvisited links. Please let us know in the comments which of these you prefer.

I prefer the purple. It's closest to the default color that's used across the web for visited links. I don't think it competes with unvisited links, because the whole purpose of this color is to provide information to the reader, to indicate they've read it already. This in and of itself gives the user the control to decide whether it's the link they want to visit or not, rather than the link being a muted grey that they could click again when they didn't intend to because they've already read it.

Making it harder to tell the difference between something you've read or didn't read than default, to me, feels like a dark pattern built to increase the number of times you visit a page... given if it was "interesting" to click it once, if i didn't realize i had already clicked it I might click it again.