Early Quora Design Notes
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Early Quora Design Notes
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Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#2I 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!
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."
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."
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#3How 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.
I don't get it.
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#4How 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. I don't get it.
On one hand the UI doesn't seem remarkable. On the other hand, neither does Craigslist, Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Facebook....
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#5Hmm. 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.
It might not be as interesting on face as game design, but it can be really rewarding when you get it right.
edit: and quora is an example of extreme attention to detail enabling a really great site to flourish.
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#6Why 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:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#7How 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. I don't get it.
On one hand the UI doesn't seem remarkable. On the other hand, neither does Craigslist, Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Facebook....
You're right about Craigslist and maybe Zappos, but Facebook won, among other things, for being the first truly usable, non-hideous social network. And they keep creating new UX elements.
Amazon has so many remarkable UI inventions that they patented some (not that I agree with that).
eBay has pioneered a lot of UI innovation as well.
Usability and UX invention is in the core of this 3 companies.
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#8I'm actually surprised to read so many non positive comments. I am really impressed by Quora's design (and some of the thinking process mentioned in this article) and here's why:
Its not about the graphic design (pretty colors, nice images, etc), it's about the product design. Which features to include, which to exclude, in order to create a system that generates the desired behavior out of your users.
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#9(Disclaimer: I gave up on Quora months ago – maybe they've fixed these things)
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.
I think it mostly hinges around discovery and sense of place. On Quora, it never feels like you are anywhere. No sense of hierarchy, no sense of order. Quora is a massive sense of limbo. It's really weird.
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 could 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.
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.
Contrast this with Convore, which gives you:
- Discussions your friends have joined - Bigass list of all discussions - Discussions by category - Discussion search
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.
Re: Early Quora Design Notes
#10What 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 that special. Or am I missing something?