A Case Study of “Designed By Developers:” Stack Overflow
I think some people have focused too much on his mockup rather than his point - Stack Overflow's design is poor, with some very bizarre decisions. He only touches on some of the problems with the site.<p>Let's take the bright orange banner at the top of the screen that appears only to new users.<p>Obviously, it's not just new users that see it. It's anyone who hasn't got a cookie on their browser indicating they haven't closed the ugly bright orange banner before, so it's hitting plenty of people who know this information already.<p>But let's ignore that, and ask whether it does the job: how useful is the information contained in the big ugly bright orange banner to new users? Not very, I suspect. For most users, the purpose of the site will be implicit - from context (because they did a search for their problem and were linked to it), from the design (it looks like a Q&A site), and from the content (questions and answers). If it's not implicit, then the exact same information is explicitly stated in a box on the right-hand-side of the site. No other popular modern site on the web does these sort of popups anymore, so I don't see why the creators of Stack Overflow thought they were a good idea. In addition, why does the big ugly annoying bright orange banner link to the FAQ? What pecentage of new users will ever want, need, or read the FAQ? Users don't read <i>anything</i>. If the idea is to encourage sign-ups, then create a sign-up link, not a link to something nobody will read.<p>Then there's the functionality of the big ugly annoying intrusive bright orange banner. It loads after the rest of the page loads, then shifts all the elements of the DOM down. Just in case you'd missed the bright orange banner that distracts you while using the site, it scrolls with you, displaying on all Stack Overflow pages until you're forced to go out of your way to move your mouse to close it (with their weird 'close' icon), when finally (if you're near the top) it shifts the DOM up again, just to ensure it can be maximally irritating.<p>I don't see how "you’re seeing the one-time new user screen layout" should be regarded as any sort of defence for the big ugly annoying intrusive distracting irritating bright orange banner. Do new users somehow deserve bad design and bad functionality?<p>In my eyes, Stack Overflow has firmly been a success <i>despite</i> its poor design. It's not as though Experts Exchange set a very high bar to beat usability-wise.