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.
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.
I'm not really qualified to comment, as I've only encountered Quora via deep links, and sometimes some additional clicking around. But the above summarizes my impression, both from my own limited interaction and from the limited amount of "the buzz" [1] that enters my personal world. Quora became the next cool, limited, (temporarily?) high S/N place to be, after the previous one became too noisy.
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1 Oops, no pun intended. Although, OT, I have been wondering whether Buzz is going to "make it", longer term, or whether it's already on or being considered for a near term hit list (e.g. Wave's fate (but without an open source spinoff that I can imagine)).
-Homepage: Big wall of stuff
--User page, another wall
---Info
---Pictures
--Your profile
---Pictures
etc
At no point do ever look around in Facebook and think "where am I? How do I go somewhere else?" Other users exist on Facebook. Discovering them is straightforward. If I want more friends, I know how to get them.
Tailoring the experience to your personal profile is the correct choice. Quora just isn't doing it correctly. What you're saying makes a lot of sense, though, in that Quora is treating questions and topics like people. It seems like using a screwdriver to make an omelet.
I don't get it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
To that effect, 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.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...
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."
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.
"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.
