Help My Business Plan Fail! Forum software design

Just funnin’ ya man. hey, I’d avoid some arbitray thing like the plague if it meant I could guess pro football games as good as you do :)

Yeah, I know.

That does make me think, however. One of the apparent necessities of being a member of this forum is thick skin. We’re just really harsh with each other in a lot of ways. I wonder if that somehow makes this a BETTER community though. It weeds out the overly sensitive people, for the most part.

I guess part of it would be an apparent lack of hierarchy in general. All Hail Tom and so forth, of course. But for the most part, as long as you’ve got either the facts or the chutzpa on your side, anyone can stand up and make a point and have it count.

Good call. Contrast this to small forums with a mod:poster ratio of like 1:2… it’s just not the same.

As a courtesy to those who participated in this thread, beta design screenshot is up

Private beta SHOULD be next week, but could slip a bit. We’ll see.

Too bright for me… red, green, yellow, and orange all on one page? Ew.

Good luck, though.

I agree it’s a bit garish, maybe change the yellow buttons to blue (to match the titles) or grey (to match the boxes and tabs).

It looks like a new initiative over at blogspot: http://molecularengineer.blogspot.com/2008/07/knol.html#

I actually like the red and green parts, though. The yellow is too bright, IMO. Colors vary by monitor, settings, etc. That makes it hard to get right. It also makes almost any type of yellow dangerous to use.

I appreciate the feedback, for sure, but if you think the current design is garish… check out the original design.

(current design can be seen at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-design/ for comparison)

Everyone’s an armchair designer, I guess. :)

It can be true that everyone is an armchair designer looking to nitpick whatever you put in front of them just so they can throw out some design jargon they heard once, but in this case those colors are just ugly, sorry… even the newer design.

Why don’t you use Adobe Kuler or ColorSchemer to find a color scheme that actually matches and doesn’t make the eyes bleed? It isn’t very hard to do even for programmers.

You maybe should tell that to the DESIGNER who put it together, not me.

Concrete suggestions (maybe with links to sites whose design you think we should ape) are welcome. Of course then I’ll tell you how much those sites make my eyes bleed, but hey, such is internet forum life. :)

Well mostly I just want to criticize, not do actual research work for you.

But if you want something concrete, start with what Robert said. That yellow on the language buttons is too bright by far. I can barely take my eyes off of it to read any of the text on the page, it is completely overwhelming and says WARNING, SOMETHING HERE NEEDS YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION in a way that those buttons don’t warrant.

See, now that’s actually helpful. Amazing!

Well, those yellow tags are sort of the backbone of the site – without good user folksonomy tagging of questions, the site essentially stops working; you’d have to come in through Google to get anywhere. We do expect to get a lot of traffic from Google, like every other site on the internet, but for users who actively participate and don’t drive-by search for immediate answers, the tags are critical to find the areas they can actually answer questions in.

We allow users who have enough reputation to edit anything including the tags, like wikipedia. Any merely logged in users can also flag offensive/spam/offtopic with a single “flag” click, and stuff that goes beyond the threshold is soft-deleted. Sort of like craigslist. So a lot of this is user driven; we won’t have an army of moderators going in and fixing tags or editing bad English – it’ll be users like you.

The original design acually works better for me. It’s drawing attention to the things that I’m supposed to be looking for (I’m guessing Votes and Answers), and giving me information about them that I need to know (answered, unanswered, responded to, etc). That being said, I can see Robert Sharpe’s objection to it.

Also, I think you’re beating up on E-E a bit much. The times I’ve used it* have been to answer pretty esoteric questions that weren’t really answered anywhere else.

*I’m not a programmer per se (just a sys-network admin that’s lazy enough to script), so if this site is going to be mainly aimed towards programmers, I’m not sure I have much more input.

I think the new re-design works fine.

I personally like how much the tags stand out since in a site like this where you’ll most likely be interested in only a few sub-categories of the articles/questions on the site, it’s important to be able to filter through the content quickly so that I only see the content that’s related to the programming language/frameworks/concepts that I’m interested in.

OK, you bastards talked me into it. I’ve warmed up to the idea of the tags being the same blue as the headlines/links – but in “tag-like” white text on blue blocks. Maybe with a small border.

Actually works fairly well this way; the blue blocks stand out.

Blue is also complimentary (opposite) to the orange of our logo. Also happens to be the colors of my alma mater, the University of Virginia. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen alumni in blue sweaters and orange pants at football games.

Maybe useful, maybe not. ObNepotism: My uncle, whose Ph.D. specialty is on the psychology of the eye, put this together for ARC/NASA for UI design folks. Despite the highfalutin’ sounding nature, it’s actually quite informative re: color selection.

Does your uncle include colorblind people in his research?

(After searching every page on his website for the term ‘colorblind’ and finding nothing, I’m going to say that the answer is ‘no’.)

And so risking saying something that Rimbo’s uncle might already have intimated, make sure your design conveys the same information to us colorblind folks as it does those who aren’t cone-challenged.

Edit: After a second reading, I realize that this could be construed as me in some way criticizing the above-linked scholarly work. I in no mean it as such.

You might want to make it not look exactly like Digg.