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by LargeWu 6192 days ago
A lot of what makes Stack Overflow successful is the amount of effort they've put into making a great user experience. That's not the sort of thing you just come up with in a weekend. It's a continual process that requires a lot of attention. And let's face it, open source's strong point generally isn't in engineering good user experience.
2 comments
jonknee 6192 days ago
I think it's more that it was launched by two really well known (by programmers) programmers. Exposure is everything.
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davidw 6192 days ago
When I first saw it, I liked the clean look and feel, but hated the "DAVE, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT" approach to permissions with regards to comments, votes, and the like. As a beginning user, you had (have? don't know if they've changed it) all these links and buttons that are displayed, but don't let you do anything; they just give you a lame message about requiring N gold stars before you can do that.
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easyfrag 6192 days ago
"Dave, I can't let you do that?" You do know that SO allows questions and answers from people without even requiring them to log in? They allow content from essentially anonymous users.

The restrictions are along the "meta" parts (voting to indicate the quality of an answer), I think it is entirely sensible to restrict these actions to users who have built up a currency of trust within the SO community.

That being said, I think you are onto to something around the user experience. Perhaps an option shouldn't be shown to someone if they cannot perform it.

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asjo 6192 days ago
That being said, I think you are onto to something around the user experience. Perhaps an option shouldn't be shown to someone if they cannot perform it.

That would be really annoying, because you wouldn't know that these options exist, until you could use them (i.e. you're possibly confused and you don't know what the reward for collecting reputation is.)

Better grey out the things you aren't allowed to do yet, so you can see them and see that you're not there yet - preferably with an explanation of when you will be.

I forgot what the term for this is, but I think it's very often a good way to do it. Stable interface? Something like that.

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