6 ms·

Early Quora Design Notes

55 points by hugoahlberg 16y ago

mrspeaker 16y ago
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! 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."
justin_vanw 16y ago
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. I don't get it.
- pud 16y ago
  On one hand the UI doesn't seem remarkable. On the other hand, neither does Craigslist, Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Facebook....
  - freddier 16y ago
    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.
emeltzer 16y ago
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. 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.
- joshhepworth 16y ago
  It really is amazing how much making sure the little things are right can help. I think it helps develop a slightly more emotional connection for the user as they find themselves subconsciously enjoying various elements that the designer/developer took the time to polish. To that effect, http://littlebigdetails.com/ http://littlebigdetails.com/, is a great list of 'little things' that can be great for inspiration / a list of innovations. Quora is on this list for a few elements.
smartydrapers 16y ago
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: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-questions/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090063125853764.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...
- antidaily 16y ago
  You created a fake account just to attack her?
yarone 16y ago
I'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.
danilocampos 16y ago
(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.
- jdp23 16y ago
  The tepidness is a direct result of the approach they took: "Really early on I decided to focus only on the product design and would forgo any time spent on things like visual design and, to some extent, branding."
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Hmm, but none of the tepidness is a result of the visual design. craigslist continues to look like shit but it works well. Quora doesn't. It's just bad product design, poor user experience, whatever you want to call it. These issues are structural, not visual or aesthetic. Slapping on a new paint job whenever they get around to it isn't going to fix the problem. It's a classic engineer's special, and that quote is a rationalization for this truth.
JCB_K 16y ago
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 that special. Or am I missing something?
- huertanix 16y ago
  Its the users. Quora started out as an invite system, so as invites percolated outward from the founders, many Silicon Valley technologists and their friends came into the fold and sort of defined its current culture. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand is full of, well, Yahoo users, and its culture is literally a joke: http://www.epicfail.com/tag/yahoo-answers/ http://www.epicfail.com/tag/yahoo-answers/
- Tycho 16y ago
  It's a total mystery to me too. I can see the argument that he people/culture make it special, but why would those people go there in the first place? Is this just like when someone opens a new bar or nightclub and for a while it's 'the place to be' ? Are there any distinguishing features at all?
mattmanser 16y ago
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&a pages. In the article he actually says he took 3 months to get the q&a page design done, interesting that they ended up with a design for that page that is so uncannily similar to SO's. 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?
- ryanglasgow 16y ago
  The designer is a she, Rebekah Cox.
  - mattmanser 16y ago
    Whoops!
rdl 16y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
- jdp23 16y ago
  If it's so hard for casual and new user, how good is it? As well as the confusing search/post box (which leads to a lot of questions getting posted by mistake), there's also the lack of categories when you create a question (which leads to a lot of orphaned questions) and the way you have to do a lot of editing of tweets to get them to be useful. Plus there's no way to move an answer to be a comment, so when people make a mistake it's a pain to recover. etc. Maybe it's all intentional to keep people out but with everybody highlighting how their business challenge is to attract users who aren't techies, that doesn't seem like the right approach to me.
  - gojomo 16y ago
    What if Quora doesn't yet want/need casual users who are unfamiliar with their central social (voting/tagging/following/constrained-searching) mechanisms? Also, familiar/orderly interactions are hard to iterate rapidly: expectations are already set. Throwing new ideas out there, and seeing if people figure them out (or use them in unexpected ways) generates more knowledge and upside potential. The mainstream will be trained-up on these interactions, by lots of other sites which settle on the same winning arrangements, in a couple years. Then, Quora will seem familiar.
ryanglasgow 16y ago
The problem is that Quora's design is not aligned with the companies motives: "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 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. 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.

55 points by hugoahlberg 16y ago

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! 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."

justin_vanw 16y ago

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. I don't get it.

pud 16y ago
On one hand the UI doesn't seem remarkable. On the other hand, neither does Craigslist, Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Facebook....
- freddier 16y ago
  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.

emeltzer 16y ago

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. 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.

joshhepworth 16y ago
It really is amazing how much making sure the little things are right can help. I think it helps develop a slightly more emotional connection for the user as they find themselves subconsciously enjoying various elements that the designer/developer took the time to polish. To that effect, http://littlebigdetails.com/ http://littlebigdetails.com/, is a great list of 'little things' that can be great for inspiration / a list of innovations. Quora is on this list for a few elements.

smartydrapers 16y ago

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: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-questions/ http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090063125853764.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...

antidaily 16y ago
You created a fake account just to attack her?

yarone 16y ago

I'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.

danilocampos 16y ago

(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.

jdp23 16y ago
The tepidness is a direct result of the approach they took: "Really early on I decided to focus only on the product design and would forgo any time spent on things like visual design and, to some extent, branding."
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Hmm, but none of the tepidness is a result of the visual design. craigslist continues to look like shit but it works well. Quora doesn't. It's just bad product design, poor user experience, whatever you want to call it. These issues are structural, not visual or aesthetic. Slapping on a new paint job whenever they get around to it isn't going to fix the problem. It's a classic engineer's special, and that quote is a rationalization for this truth.

JCB_K 16y ago

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 that special. Or am I missing something?

huertanix 16y ago
Its the users. Quora started out as an invite system, so as invites percolated outward from the founders, many Silicon Valley technologists and their friends came into the fold and sort of defined its current culture. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand is full of, well, Yahoo users, and its culture is literally a joke: http://www.epicfail.com/tag/yahoo-answers/ http://www.epicfail.com/tag/yahoo-answers/
Tycho 16y ago
It's a total mystery to me too. I can see the argument that he people/culture make it special, but why would those people go there in the first place? Is this just like when someone opens a new bar or nightclub and for a while it's 'the place to be' ? Are there any distinguishing features at all?

mattmanser 16y ago

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

ryanglasgow 16y ago
The designer is a she, Rebekah Cox.
- mattmanser 16y ago
  Whoops!

rdl 16y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

jdp23 16y ago
If it's so hard for casual and new user, how good is it? As well as the confusing search/post box (which leads to a lot of questions getting posted by mistake), there's also the lack of categories when you create a question (which leads to a lot of orphaned questions) and the way you have to do a lot of editing of tweets to get them to be useful. Plus there's no way to move an answer to be a comment, so when people make a mistake it's a pain to recover. etc. Maybe it's all intentional to keep people out but with everybody highlighting how their business challenge is to attract users who aren't techies, that doesn't seem like the right approach to me.
- gojomo 16y ago
  What if Quora doesn't yet want/need casual users who are unfamiliar with their central social (voting/tagging/following/constrained-searching) mechanisms? Also, familiar/orderly interactions are hard to iterate rapidly: expectations are already set. Throwing new ideas out there, and seeing if people figure them out (or use them in unexpected ways) generates more knowledge and upside potential. The mainstream will be trained-up on these interactions, by lots of other sites which settle on the same winning arrangements, in a couple years. Then, Quora will seem familiar.

ryanglasgow 16y ago

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