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How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation
- nathcd 10y agoI like it! I just wish it weren't fixed. The design does indeed add clarity and make it easier to quickly parse compared to the old nav. But it being fixed makes it feel like a design that's trying to coerce me into staying on the site longer. Which is fine (and more and more sites are doing this anyway), but to me it makes Stack Overflow feel a little bit less like a tool, and a little bit more like a company trying to subtly influence my behavior for their profit. But I'm probably reading way too much into this.
- TheOneTrueKyle 10y agoUX and business decisions seem to never get along
- gukov 10y agoYep. They even bring it up themselves in the very beginning: >“When I come here I’m on a mission; I don’t care about the rest.” >“You’re only there for 1 reason: to find the answer to your question.” >“From my point of view, nothing above the question title exists.” >“I scroll down and read the question.” People google a question, click on a Stack Overflow link, get their answer, close the tab. It works perfectly. Just not for SO, who want you to stay on the site after learning the answer. The whole blog post is Stack Overflow trying to justify them making the UX worse on purpose.
- EpicEng 10y agoAs a long time (beta) user and contributor to SO, I completely agree.
- brokenmachine 10y agoI agree, but they did make it easy to make the bar disappear like before (in Preferences-Disable Stickyness). You can't hold it against them that they want people to actually use their site.
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- nandhp 10y ago> I just wish it weren't fixed. I thought the article mentioned this, but there's a user preference to turn that off ("Disable stickyness"). http://stackoverflow.com/users/preferences/ http://stackoverflow.com/users/preferences/
- sgwae 10y agoReduce usable screen space by 15 percent all the item = instant disable. If they didn't give that option, would have blocked the whole bar, not that it currently has much use anyways.
- kasparsklavins 10y agoUsers aren't clicking on it? Better shove it in their face so it's noticed. I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up. IMO, fixed navbars are almost as bad as popups.
- nathcd 10y ago> I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up. Oh man, I've gotta strongly disagree with this. To me, those are just distracting and in practice often end up being fidgety. For tall webpages I think an easy and simple alternative is having a link like <a href="#">top</a> at the bottom of the document or wherever it makes sense. Unfortunately it seems like many designers don't really go for easy and simple.
- Ajedi32 10y agoEh, those links tend to be difficult to find and not very useful in my experience. Usually it's not much harder to just scroll back to the top manually. Plus the "show on scroll up" bars have the advantage of making it easy to access the top navigation without losing your place on the page, which is useful if you just want to open a link from the top bar in a new tab or quickly check your notifications or something.
- mathw 10y agoI find the ones that reappear when you scroll up are quite annoying, particularly on mobile which is, sadly, where you actually need them more! In this case, I am utterly indifferent to Stack Overflow's being fixed. At least it's not going to surprise me.
- hashhar 10y agoIt's toggleable. The default right now is opt-out. But I think it can be made opt-in for logged in users and opt-out for anons (to make them remember and notice where they came, most don't even notice the url when searching the internet).
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
- rmtew 10y ago> I like it! I just wish it weren't fixed. Now there's just a bar I'm ignoring that's obscuring part of the useful information.
- yakshaving_jgt 10y agoStack Overflow did well with this. Now I wonder if GitHub will chime in with why they decided to redesign their header recently to, in my opinion, a hideous design.
- slig 10y agoThe new black header on GH made me think someone famous has passed (like HN did in the past).
- serg_chernata 10y agoSame here, I spent good 10 minutes looking at their homepage and blog in hopes of finding an explanation.
- cormullion 10y agoI took another 5 minutes to find this useful add-on for Safari: https://freestyler.ws/style/152684/github-white-header https://freestyler.ws/style/152684/github-white-header
- hiepph 10y agoAnd I thought it was an event, and won't last long. But now it's still there :)
- johndoe4589 10y agoI agree... yuck. I do think if you take a step back and squint a little bit you can sense their design lacks a bit of contrast, but the black header bar is an ugly fix.
- zurfyx 10y agoIt looks great atm, now it matches the colors of the site. They even recently added it a grey-er background color which makes it different from the content background.
- kleiba 10y agoDamn, that update renders StackOverflow unsuable in Firefox 3.6.18pre :-(
- liquidise 10y ago> A/B Test with 5% of Anonymous Visitors > A/B Test with 10% of Registered Users with Less than 500 Rep These headlines are the biggest lessons for devs in this article. I cannot stress how valuable these anonymous, code-regulated tests are. Once your site has reached any appreciable traffic size, invest some time into how you can segment users for testing feature updates. While we like to think all new features/updates are positive, the reality is rarely so positive. Anonymous tests are a great way to improve your feature offering without sacrificing the experience of all users.
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- tofflos 10y agoHello! Unsolicited armchair expert here! I initially came here to say that I also prefer the new design but would appreciate something non-fixed. I realize there's a setting for it but that means I have to login just to get rid of it. Like most people I only read the site. Then I sort of got stuck on the sentence in the article that suggested I might be missing out on some of the things that Stackoverflow has to offer. I believe I have fairly common workflow. I Google, read the question and all the responses, then open all the referenced questions in new tabs and recursively work my way through them until I have exhausted all the material on the topic. You seem to be very familiar with that type of workflow. It's even mentioned in the article. But it's also a bit odd when I think about it. I can't recall that I have ever visited Stackoverflow directly. For some reason I always come from Google. Heck, I even type "stackoverflow" into the Google search bar so that your results will come up on top. That's very different from my normal browsing pattern. Usually I go to a site directly. So why am I doing this and what am I missing out on? I decided to take a tour of your site! 1. The front page isn't very useful to me. I believe you could make an argument that it's not very useful to most people. It displays the new top navigation bar, a large sign inviting me to sign up, lots of low quality questions in wildly different areas less than a minute old. Maybe this is useful to someone else. To me it's about as useful as if Google would show the 10 most recently indexed sites on their landing page. 2. The top navigation bar didn't really seem to have anything interesting until it struck me that I always search your site with Google. But there is a search feature somewhere... Why is the search bar so small? Why isn't it more prominent? Oh, and it's possible to browse for more interesting topics using tags. I do that sometimes. Why don't I do that more often? Also I should contribute more to Stackoverflow. Why don't I do that? ... So if you want to change my behavior to be someone who goes to your landing page, searches using your search feature, browses by categories, and monitors familiar topics - then I suggest you try some of the following things: 1. Make searching and browsing topics the focus of the landing page. (The Google search bar isn't "hidden" in the top navigation) 2. Remember which topics I'm interested in without requiring me to login. 3. Change the font on Windows to Segoe UI. ;-) 4. Change the header to be non-fixed without requiring me to login. Currently you're just a place where the search results are stored. But I have a hunch that if I'm actively coming to your site and using your services, then I would be more likely to register, login and participate. It would perhaps strengthen my impression of a community. I make no guarantee that my suggestions will work but you could A/B test it using the method described in the article. :) Thank you for Stackoverflow and keep up the good work!
- ouid 10y agoWhat an idiotic premise, "the logo is the focal point of the page". No, the question and answer are the focal point of the page. Did you learn nothing from the thing that you claimed to have learned something from?
- legostormtroopr 10y agoStackOverflow is making a whole host of bad decisions lately. I worry for developers everywhere if they keep making missteps like this. Its not like "free Q&A site" is a long-term sustainable business, especially if they keep messing with users like they are.
- brokenmachine 10y agoWhat are the other things they have done?
- legostormtroopr 10y agoMade a poorly worded statement against the recent travel restrictions, that: A. Alienated any non left or non-US members B. Used their position to break their own rules C. Told the community that they would do A and B again In the process they alienated a lot of high rep users who are slowly leaving the site. Myself included, who had my 20k+ account deleted. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-endeavor-to-do-whats-right-well-try-to-do-it-better-next-time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-...
- brokenmachine 10y agoYou're leaving the site because of a single announcement you didn't agree with? > Myself included, who had my 20k+ account deleted. What reason did they give for deleting your account? Where's the original statement?
- legostormtroopr 10y ago
- brokenmachine 10y agoAlthough I'm not a super-fan of the redesign (99% of the time I prefer words to cryptic icons with hover text), I must say, I do love the openness of Stack Overflow with their blog posts, etc. It's nice to read about the design decisions that go into a large successful site.
- xbvp 10y agoThere is a problem for those wanting to print the page. The bar obscures text on consecutive pages. This is an issue for Quora as well.