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This is bound to catch some wind from the front, because it goes in totally against the just fresh choice of separating SE meta from Stack Overflow Meta, but just hang in to read it.

Analysis of current user experience

  • logins: I just thought about posting this, so I was on SO where I was logged in (I use STack Exchange OpenID) and decided to go SE. Fill in password again. Now I click on meta. Fill in password again, and so it has been all day (with SE meta I added the 18th entry for autotype windows in keepassX which, due to a bug, fails to properly autotype thus still requires human intervention[1]), since I have been active on a few sites and my poor old computer has crashed twice today, I have logged in several times to the same websites. That, my friends, is bad user experience.

  • fragmentation: I'm a programmer, so I like SO, but wait, ah, there is also programmers and oh, there's one for wordpress and oh, security.stackexchange but maybe also tor or unix and serverfault, hmm (needless to say I also like cooking and gardening and, and...). I might be interested in seeing questions on all these sites, because I might well be able to help someone, but frankly am I going to go regularly to all these sites? Entering my password for all of them? No, of course not. The reverse is also true. I have a question about wordpress development. Nah, let's post it on SO, at least I'll get an answer. Seems not many people bother even to migrate such questions anymore. The other sites, I just go to them if I have a question that really doesn't belong on SO or if I have notifications. I feel like thinking there is a threshold after which a site takes off is an illusion. It's just nice at least for anything computer related to get answers quickly when you are stuck, so getting an answer 3 days later is not the same as 3 minutes later.

  • current UI: any fancy searching requires you to check the help center, and for an amnesiac like me that means every time. A more graphical modern system for searching and filtering would definitely be nice.

Possible solution Say if all the domains would redirect to SE. You would have to login only once. If a good frontend were to be in place which would allow easy and refined control over which content the user wants to see, what could possibly be lost in the process exept for the annoying logins and the fragmentation? Would I check the other sites more often if all I had to do was click on the SO logo in the top left for it to open me a beautiful cloud with the different domains, maybe showing the domains which I am active on a bit more prominently? Sure I would. When changing the domain, CSS styles could be employed to keep the different look and feel just like now. Filters could mean that it only shows content and tags from within that domain. Or if I search for a tag that exists in several domains, the interface could hint me there are search results in these other domains.

Actually you can go much further with making content more abstract. But you can also win a lot by making tags less abstract, and for example you can group them. The domain group would have the domains. Other tags would always belong to one or several of them as well as every question could be in a domain, reputation could still be linked to a domain (although it would make less sense)... The level tag could have something like beginner, amateur, professional, research question (maybe meta thrown in that group)... See how serverfault now tries to be just for professional questions? What if it where just a tag, and it would be easy to filter on it. It could at once apply to all subjects. The language tag group could allow SE to be multilingual. State: no answers, no accepted answers, accepted, closed, protected. And then the bulk group, let's call it subject? Maybe there would be a few more groups that are justified, but I can't think of any right now. Point is give them structure and turn tags into filters that you can combine easily through an innovative UI.

Make it easier to link other resources in both questions and answers, attachments, related questions, geographic or time data, source code repositories or online compilers like ideone, jsfiddle, scientific research, videos, ... By categorising them you can more easily differentiate how you present them.

Sure, right now SE has a very minimal approach to its UI and that definitely has its charm. I'm not proposing that it would become all bells and whistles, but there is often a sweet spot somewhere in the middle that just manages to steal the good from different opposing ideals.

Is it harder to design such a versatile system, sure. But graph databases are popping up and they have interesting properties for something like this. It is definitely possible given enough resources to make this work.

I think it is crucial to have a good representation of your problem domain in order to create versatile software and I feel the artificial splitting up of all the SE sites does not do honor to the abstract nature of questions and subject matters. Even question is sometimes questionable. Is this post a question?

[1] That bug btw. has been fixed two years ago, but will surely take another three to make it to debian testing package repos.

asked Apr 20, 2014 at 14:42
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    Trying to lump everything together is a terrible idea in my opinion. Commented Apr 20, 2014 at 15:00
  • Ok, lumping together seems like the wrong way to see it. Let me rephrase: if you abstract out content, you can present it to the user anyway you want (with the exception of the address bar, but subdomains will work). If you separate it arbitrarily you can't anymore. It's about keeping your options open. Commented Apr 20, 2014 at 15:05
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    This is never going to happen, it just isn't how SE works. Why don't you use the API and develop something like this, see how it goes? Commented Apr 20, 2014 at 17:10

1 Answer 1

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For logging in, I use Google OAuth, and probably have to deal with actually logging in maybe once per month. I'm always logged into my Google account, so even if I do need to login to an SE site, I don't have to enter a password repeatedly. Since Stack Exchange gives you an option to add more than one login to your account, consider adding some sort of OAuth login so you don't need to continue to repeatedly enter the same password over and over again.

As for the modern searching tools you speak of, they already exist. And Stack Exchange developers have this uncanny ability to avoid re-inventing the wheel unless they're going to revolutionize the wheel. Since Google pretty much arguably rules the land of search, it's safe to say that Stack Exchange outsources this job to them.

In fact, in a talk Joel Spolsky gave in 2009, he mentions how the main page of Stack Overflow is actually http://google.com. People with a problem come to Google, enter their problem in the search bar, and pick from a list of results that look like they may solve the problem.

Perhaps the answer is to replace the Stack Exchange search with a Google-powered search, that way people like you who naturally reach for the search in the Stack Exchange UI still benefit from the search that most of Stack Exchange's visitors use. Or perhaps it's best for us to just recognize that to find something on Stack Exchange, it's just best to use Google. It's the ultimate unifier.

You also mentioned tagging, but ideally you should split this feature request up. There's a lot of different things in here, which makes it hard to cover them all and vote on the best solutions. My suggestion is to focus on one feature at a time. Hope this helps.

answered Apr 20, 2014 at 17:11