Stack Overflow Redesign: Navigation and Homepage

Questions are way too far down the line in the new design. From 2nd to 7th (!) in your example.

This is still a Q&A network, right?

What is the "ad" in the question feed? It looks like a question but it says "Ad" where question stats (score, answer count, acceptance) are shown.

1. Why's content - things relevant to someone using the site hidden way under a site switcher - communities should be below that. Also, since we've gotten chat back, meta should be under content.

2. How are communities selected to be in the sidebar?

3. The sidebar in the color and typography page was a lot more crowded. It feels like y'all are copying reddit's design but the way people consume information on reddit is very different from stack exchange and stack overflow. How does someone select the sites they want? What's the other ways to find a site? What happens when you click on a sidebarred site?

4. So carrying on from the answer to the first look question. What does clicking on a communities link look like? If its all SO, how is someone going to know they're on a seperate site?

5. Which homepage? SO's homepage was very.. unsuccessfully used as a billboard for a bit. And once again, I'm concerned about potential confusion if this is the stackexchange.com landing page.

6. What's "create"? on the new landing page do? It puts AI front and center so how do we onboard users to the more 'traditional' SE experience from there?

We've moved the "Ask Question" button to the top navigation bar to make it more prominent and easier to access from anywhere on the site.

Where? I don't see anything on the "new navigation bar" that would make me think I could use it to ask a question. Based on your screenshot, moving left to right across the nav bar, this is what I see:

• An awkward amount of whitespace.
• A double-curly-brace icon next to a magnifying glass. The magnifier is the universal symbol for search so maybe this is a search feature? The color scheme would imply that the portion with the magnifying glass is an interactive text field, but that doesn't make sense with only an icon there. If that part is actually a button, there's nowhere to type in a search term. The brace icon resembles the icon used in the new left column for "AI Assist", so I'll assume this activates some sort of AI feature and is simply located next to the search bar in hopes that someone mis-clicks it when trying to search. If this is an AI button, isn't it redundant with the "AI Assist" button on the left column? It makes much more sense over on the left.
• A search box, similar to the current one but inexplicably half the size. An odd decision when the left half of the bar is completely empty. Scrolling left and right in a text field is annoying on a desktop PC and borderline infuriating on a touchscreen. Longer search fields reduce the likelihood that your query will overflow the box and require scrolling.
• A "Create" button. There's no indication of what exactly I'd create by clicking it.
• A bell icon, which I'm assuming is the replacement for the "inbox" icon that shows messages and rep changes. A bell normally means "notifications". If I wasn't an experienced site user that already knew that you get notifications for these things, I likely wouldn't have made that connection.
• A square image that I'm assuming is a profile icon. Hint: it would be far easier to compare the two designs if you used the same profile icons, fake logged-in user, sample content, etc. on both sets of screenshots.

Given the available options, I'd probably say the "Create" button is the most likely to hide a question creation function. But why do I have to guess? I thought it was supposed to be "prominent"? Why not a button that says "Ask a Question"? The only reason I would be able to find that functionality is because you told me ahead of time that an "ask question" button was hidden there somewhere.

Please, never forget that a significant number of users of this site do not speak English as their primary language. Some manage to stumble through the site using minimal English skills, and others rely on translation software. Labeling a button "Create" when it really means "Ask a question" is the type of indirect labeling that becomes indecipherable to non-native speakers. It may seem synonymous to you, but it's an isolated word on a page with no context. It can easily be translated into something that no longer resembles the meaning that you intend. Heck, I'm a native English speaker, and I'm no more than 50% confident that I understand what that button is supposed to do.

This is also where non-textual communication is important. The old search bar had the universally-recognized magnifying glass icon in it. You could thus identify it as a search bar even if the entire page was rendered in Wingdings. The new search bar lacks this, and relies on the user understanding the "Search" watermark (which likely disappears when you click in the box, leaving you with a blank and completely unlabeled text field). Making this more confusing is the magnifying glass that's placed to the left of it, seemingly as part of a completely different UI element. I'd be tempted to type in a search query and then click the magnifying glass icon to perform the search, but I'd suspect that something completely different would happen in this proposed new UI. The magnifying glass there makes no sense in and of itself, and is actively misleading when placed next to a search field.

Posting AI generated content is not allowed on most of the sites. That AI assist prompt on the top, should be accompanied with very visible warning that using AI when writing posts on sites is not allowed.

Based on my experience as Stack Overflow moderator, the small banner you are showing over the answer window will no longer suffice. If nothing else, you would have to make that answer banner non dismissible.

Even now, too many people close that banner, some even without reading it properly, and then forget that it ever existed. Others who are aware of AI policies, after seeing new AI features prominently displayed all over will take that as a signal that using AI is now allowed.

This only creates friction between users who post AI without being properly informed about AI policies and moderators who are tasked with removing such content.

Instead of building on sites' strength, human experts, you will be turning the sites into another place dominated with a mostly useless chat prompt. Please don't do that.

So... you're just going to shove AI assist front and center. great. that's surely not going to hurt our user engagement problem and chase away anyone who actually wanted to contribute to our cause..

Does the top section go away if we aren't in any "communities" (i assume this is collectives rebranded? not to be confused with "communities" in the left nav-column that's for other sites?)

We put communities up top because we wanted to be community > content.

This is a Q&A site, not a social media forum. You have a community because of the content, not the other way around.

If I go to SO, I want to see the stuff pertinent to SO. If I wanted to see cooking Q&A, I would've just gone there in the first place. I don't go to a hardware store to get directions to a sandwich shop. The only other stack I would want to visit when on SO is Meta. Even if for some reason I couldn't remember the URL for one of the a hundred or so stacks that exist, odds are I'm not going to find it as one of the 3 random ones on the side, and I'm going to have to go to the hamburger menu.

How would users log out?

Just to be clear, this is a very serious question. We currently have enough users asking it that it is part of the FAQ for Stack Overflow and frequently used as a duplicate for yet another user who cannot find the button.

And now I cannot find it in the new design.

What are the communities?

They seem to be pretty important if they are above the question feed. But this seems to be the first I know of them.

Also, the design shows them as a permanent feature. Users are supposed to always be looking for new communities. The example does not seem to allow for collapsing or dismissing this search.

Improved site switcher: We've moved the site switcher, making it easier to jump directly between all the communities you use.

I assume this:

It takes one less click but I cannot see how to reach other communities that are not pinned. I often find myself opening the site switcher to search for some site, even if I am not a user there. I might just need to find which site is applicable for a question in order to suggest it to somebody. Or check on something then maybe not return for another six months.

Unfortunately a lot of these updates presume that people have enabled "Show left navigation" in the settings; some people do and some do not, and those that don't always seem to lose some functionality which is not duplicated in the tabs that are used when the sidebar is disabled.

Look at the depleted Menu on the: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions webpage:

As updates came to the left navigation they were not updated in the sub-top-menu (?) , or a sub-sub-top-menu added to incorporate the additional features (such as: Chat (for the default site-specific chat), Teams, and on SO, the Collectives).

Worse is that the skinny left menu presumes that on mobile browsers (even in Desktop Mode view) we have easily usable rollovers (and Toast); instead we must press and hold, then back button.

It's obviously (?) not a simple matter of swiping the pointer arrow down the left side, the aforementioned key sequence must be repeated for each item on the left side when searching for the item you want (until you learn which is which).

Before the left navigation was too wide eating up too much valuable screen, now It's going to be too skinny (taking up space, and not providing much information).

It would be OK if you did have a desktop computer and mouse but on a cellphone (which is used well over 50% of the time, according to stats from a few years ago) you'd like to turn left navigation off, but now we are going to be missing out on even more info.

A great way to have both is the upper left Hamburger, but it suffers from the unsynchronized updating problem too; though slightly less bad:

If you fixed the missing toppings in the Hamburger to duplicate the left navigation menu when it's disabled that would be an easy fix.

I do not see a way in the new navigation to access reviews or the 10k tools (currently, only accessible through the review queues dropdown).

How would these be accessed under the new navigation?

The "Stack Overflow" at the top of the nav column: is that going to be present on every stack, similar to how "Stack Exchange" is currently, not linking to the current site but instead taking the user away from the current site, something site logos typically don't do on most websites?

Given the new communities section on the left, does it show communities you've hidden?

A lot of people "join" communities just for one action or another at some point and never really are a part of the community or intend to participate there, or join it for site functionality or to test something stack has decided to only test one one community. There's even some who use a script to join literally every community so they can either earn badges or download the full data dump (since that promised feature doesn't exist yet.) If it showed hidden communities it'd be pretty useless to anyone who uses "join community" in a way outside of your intended way.

This is less a thing of design and more of functionality but I don't like that the AI assistant is integrated with the homepage.

As you know it's not giving attributions or not always giving attributions and if it's giving some attribution, it's not mentioning who edited the comment last or showing the full text as written by a human but just showing a summary and maybe the main author except in the cases where it takes the content completely from an outside service, which however surely also was trained on SE content.

This feels like a devaluation of the human work that went into building this library and makes me not wanting to contribute to it anymore.

I could answer technical Q&A, but that would only result in showing other people some minced version of the content and my name much less often than it should. That's not what I want.

I would have left the AI assistant in the side bar.

The left-hand navigation can still be collapsed and will now be pinned to the left side of your screen.

Is that on the homepage or everywhere? I prefer it to not take up screen space. But I can live with it just being on the homepage.

As an answerer and curator, not a question asker, my main goal is to get to my custom filters so I can view questions that I am likely to be able to answer; these are still missing from your newly designed homepage. This is really frustrating. There are several types of different users that come to the site and the askers are just one part of that user base. It is the one that Stack Overflow Inc likely depend on the most for getting the initial traffic, yes, but the answerers produce the content that your visitors rely on; an unanswered question isn't going to help the user that depends on Stack Overflow for solutions, just tell someone else they had the problem. You end up wondering what Denvercoder9 did see.

I realise you can't please everybody, but you could either select a more neutral layout or allow people more options in terms of configuration.

My eyes do not work together. This means I experience, basically, two distinct visual fields. My right eye is dominant and focuses well. This is the eye I read with. It is the eye I navigate websites with. My left eye cannot focus as well. Most of the time, I am not consciously aware of the image from this eye. (I presumably get some information from it, since I have some degree of depth perception, though much less than binocular vision provides.)

Right now on SE, I only really have to find one important thing on the left: Questions from the drop-down menu. Notifications, chat etc. are on the top right, which, as it happens is helpful to me.

In contrast, the new design pushes a lot of crucial links to the left and down. As it happens, that is worse for me in two ways.

First, important things are harder to focus on and select.

Second, important things on the left will tend to draw my attention, which makes it harder for my brain to suppress the image from my left eye.

I hope it is obvious that I am not suggesting putting these things on the right instead.

The top is relatively neutral, at least for the (extremely limited!) ophthalmic conditions I'm aware of.

Better still would be some flexibility so users can configure the layout to suit themselves.

I see questions listed together without indications of what communities they are part of. Has this feed been changed to only show questions from one community at a time?

Personally, I think the new UI is still way to cluttered. For more than 10 years I have been using custom CSS and ublock to hide lots of elements on the pages. I guess I will just update that when the new design hits (as I always do when another thing is added to the pages). For example, here is a snippet from ublock:

stackoverflow.com###hot-network-questions > ul
stackoverflow.com##.p0.s-sidebarwidget__items.s-sidebarwidget--content
stackoverflow.com##.pb12.s-anchors.s-sidebarwidget
stackoverflow.com##.mb8.mt32.ps-relative.js-freemium-cta
stackoverflow.com##.js-sticky-leftnav.left-sidebar--sticky-container
stackoverflow.com##.pb16.ai-center.d-flex.s-sidebarwidget--header

I also do this to not get distracted while working. Just now I got distracted, read this post and wrote this answer, because I did not remove the "featured on meta" box on one of the pages.

When the left menu is collapsed down to a vertical ribbon with just icons, does it expand on hover the same way many other menus like this do?

This menu expanding on hover would be very annoying for anyone who keeps their web browser in a second monitor on the right, because every time you move your mouse from one monitor to another it will expand briefly as you pass over it (or get stuck open till you return)

Without color, the icons all run together.