Early Quora Design Notes

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!<p>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."<p>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."

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.<p>I don't get it.

I'm actually surprised to read so many non positive comments. I am <i>really</i> impressed by Quora's design (and some of the thinking process mentioned in this article) and here's why:<p>Its not about the graphic design (pretty colors, nice images, etc), it's about the <i>product design</i>. Which features to include, which to exclude, in order to create a system that generates the desired behavior out of your users.

The problem is that Quora's design is not aligned with the companies motives:<p>"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<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>It might not be as interesting on face as game design, but it can be really rewarding when you get it right.<p>edit: and quora is an example of extreme attention to detail enabling a really great site to flourish.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

(Disclaimer: I gave up on Quora months ago – maybe they've fixed these things)<p>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.<p>I think it mostly hinges around discovery and sense of place. On Quora, it never feels like you <i>are</i> anywhere. No sense of hierarchy, no sense of order. Quora is a massive sense of limbo. It's really weird.<p>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 <i>could</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Contrast this with Convore, which gives you:<p>- Discussions your friends have joined - Bigass list of all discussions - Discussions by category - Discussion search<p>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.

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:<p><a href="http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-questions/" rel="nofollow">http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest...</a><p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090063125853764.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...</a>

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 <i>that</i> special. Or am I missing something?

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&#38;a pages.<p>In the article he actually says he took 3 months to get the q&#38;a page design done, interesting that they ended up with a design for that page that is so uncannily similar to SO's.<p>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?