Despite all the really negative comments (and yes, I agree that Quora shouldn't hide its great content from guests), Quora is fairly valuable for me. I spend more time on Quora than I do on Facebook or Twitter; the only site I spend more time on is HN.
The reason is that Quora has a lot of really reputable, valuable, and domain-specific contributors, and it's easy to identify answers from people who have credibility on a subject. On HN there's a lot of noise, and there's a really common phenomenon of people bullshitting about subjects where they really have no credibility (usually the most controversial topics on HN like politics, economics, venture capital). The same is true for Quora, but on Quora you can identify people's domain-expertise better (it's posted next to each answer), and the best contributions percolate to the top much better than on HN. It's interesting to note that one thing people have always wanted on HN is the ability to follow certain users and certain topics, which is something Quora does.
For just the startup/tech world, there are tons of contributions from experienced VCs, angel investors, experienced entrepreneurs, etc. Outside of tech, you get pleasant surprises like former police officers answering questions about policing, movie directors answering questions about movies they've directed, etc.
Quora is still young, so there are a lot of quality early adopters. Going forward, it remains to be seen whether the quality will degrade as Quora gets more popular.
The biggest problem with the onboarding is that most of my value is through following "famous" (credible) people, I get very little value from following topics or questions, because when you start doing that you get lot's of noise (random or semi-credible people answering). This doesn't seem to be something emphasized in the current flow.
EDIT (reply to below): There's a lot of noise. There are a lot of gems, too, but it's easier to identify the gems. I don't think of things in terms of inside vs. outside the so-called SV bubble, so I don't really share that sentiment. An experienced entrepreneur is still credible to me, even if they are in SV.
"Quora has a lot of really reputable, valuable, and domain-specific contributors, and it's easy to identify answers from people who have credibility on a subject"
I haven't been back to Quora for a couple of years, but there seemed to be a lot of astro-turfing by people who self-appointed themselves as "credible people". I also found that it was difficult to discover interesting content by genuine experts who exist outside of the "valley" VC/entrepreneurial bubble.
Yes, I really find this to be the issue with Quora. It's great branding about the wisdom of the crowds, thought leaders and what not. But really when all you have are a bunch of subjective questions/answers that people vote up, what else do you expect to happen except the one with most broad and popular appeal goes to the top. That's not the truth, that's a popularity contest. It's the same thing you have with the news -- reading it feels informative, until you see them horribly screw up something you know very well, and everybody laps it up mindlessly. Once you see that happen, you can't trust anything you read there.
For every legitimately influential person who posts on Quora, there are 10-20 "CEOs" with expired or dead links to their "startup".
The whole community on Quora also seems uncomfortably obsessed with wealth and being/getting rich. I can't browse through it for too long before I tire of that atmosphere.
I found quora a few times through google, and i HATED them because i could only see answer 1. I HATED QUORA soo much.
After signing up, I realised that its much more than just a QnA website.
Quora is a great place to find interesting discussions about a wide variety of topics.
The QnA part is mostly an excuse for domain experts to blow you away with interesting content.
its a community where experts can discuss interesting topics in their field, and I believe the "google spam" thing is helping keep the community this way for 2 reasons:
1. People coming from Google are expecting a "yahoo answers" type of website (public opinion, not expert advice). They want their answer and they are out.
If they could see all the results, the trolls (of which there are many) they would probably be tempted to signup with a fake account, just to add their throll-y whimsical answer or comment and never return.
2. If you go through the pain of being on-boarded, you probably care about the topic enough to become an engaged member of the community. Which will help maintain the quality of the website.
I'm not sure if the author is trolling, but that's probably because I've been extremely livid at Quora for the past couple of days. I had an account from years ago, but now I can't do a single thing unless I follow 5 topics. I can't even read the first answer like an anonymous user can, and I can't access my profile page to delete my account. The only option I have is to go into developer tools and delete the modal from the DOM when I get linked to a question.
You can roll your eyes at me all you want, but I'm bring cantankerous for a reason: I have had an account for years and they locked me out, and I find that really rather offensive. I now have a worse experience than an anonymous user, which is just silly.
I'm the author, and I definitely wasn't intending to troll - I'm just documenting the experience and sharing my takeaways, with as little judgement as possible.
Personally speaking, I'm also not a fan of dark UX patterns and such, and have found myself frustrated with their UI decisions at times, as well.
If you get sick of individually hacking website DOMs, you can install a CSS manager (Stylebot, Stylish), or Greasemonkey for that matter, to make your edits permanent.
That said, I'm strongly considering "* { display: none; }" for quora.com.
I dislike Quora for a number of reasons, many of which are described in that presentation:
1. Quora make it hard to begin accessing content when arriving from Google search results for the first time.
2. Seems to be filled with pointless echo chamber people like Scoble and cliques of so called "thought leaders"....I have a hard time understanding the point of Robert Scoble and self-appointed "thought leaders". I hate to use the term, but there's a lot of "circle jerking" going on in Quora with "famous people".
3. Even when I did sign up with a throwaway account, everything about their navigation and page layout is hard. Questions and answers are jammed into a narrow sliver of content area. On a 24" 1920x1200, with a browser window occupying just half that width, it looks crap.
4. When I last used Quora (about two years ago) it was hard to just randomly leap around looking for interesting content. there didn't seem to be a 10000 foot view of what I can look at and randomly dip into.
5. Dark patterns.
But then I was spoiled by Stack Overflow which allows me instant access to content which is well laid out and easy to comprehend and consume. Yes, SO may have 6.5 million+ questions, but their tagging feature alone (including tag synonyms) makes it a piece of cake to see just the stuff I want to see, but also hop around. I truly hope SE's philosophy of zero friction user onboarding, easy access to content and sensible moderation constraints burn Quora.
I short, I just can't bring myself to use Quora, I really did want to, I truly did, but everything about the way they operate is hostile/icky. As someone who, after suffering years of internet loonies (on usenet, mailing lists, phpBB), and can appreciate the need for well managed and curated content, and constructive and intelligent discourse, I find Quora has failed to engage me on so many levels.
I also don't know a single person in my circle of close and near friends who bother with Quora (both technical and non-technical clever, and internet savvy people). They too are fatigued with the whole "gotta sign up to see our content" thing.
Quora isn't any better than Experts Exchange which I stopped using even before SO came on the scene back in 2008. It's just a high-falutin' incarnation of EE, I truly hope Quora fails.
3. Even when I did sign up with a throwaway account, everything about their navigation and page layout is hard. Questions and answers are jammed into a narrow sliver of content area. On a 24" 1920x1200, with a browser window occupying just half that width, it looks crap.
...
But then I was spoiled by Stack Overflow which allows me instant access to content which is well laid out and easy to comprehend and consume.
I would point out that Stack Overflow also has a fixed-size content area. It is a bit bigger (660 px vs. 485 px), but at 1920x1200, you're looking at 25% vs. 34% of the screen for the Q&A which will look rather empty. Plus the font size is actually larger on Stack Overflow so the information density is probably about the same.
I rarely go to Quora myself, but it has nothing to do with stylistic choices.
Yes agree mostly, but somehow SO's layout hits my visual comprehension sweetspot pretty good. I guess my only complaint would be this which I raised a while back, but was poo-poo'd:
With nearly 5 years under its belt, zero revenue, grossly overvalued at 400m$, new blog features backfiring, silly registration tactics, I see no reason why people should bother to cover this product. Its got nothing going for it at the moment.
Weird that they use this as Quora's 'onboarding'. I bet they get most of their signups/onboarding from the annoying SEO spam they have with the "signup to see more than the first answer (or close this annoying popup box to see that magical first answer)" popup.
Google needs to give the entire Quora site a large negative ranking Rapgenius-style.
I'm the one who put the teardown together, and I actually completely agree with you - I think it's pretty unlikely that the majority of their signups would actually come from their home page. I thought it was an interesting flow nonetheless and thought I'd document/share.
Well, thanks for that. It looks like it is well made, your comments are interesting enough, and I would never see it, because Quora is seriously annoying.
Edit: Sry for that repeat-comment, kind of redundant.
These teardowns are great -- thanks to the author for doing them.
Onboarding is so important to breaking the ice with users, and providing with a clear sense of what to do after they register. They got sold about some value proposition before they registered, and chances are they probably need to do some work before they start seeing that value: adding friends, installing a client, setting preferences, etc.
Users need their hand held in those first few screens. It's easy to get tunnel vision about a product when you've been building a product for weeks, and obvious steps don't seem so obvious to fresh eyes. Asking strangers to sit down and complete tasks while you watch is one of the best learning experiences you can have about your own product.
I learned the hard way a few times when I got registrations and no repeat visits. I was able to cut it significantly by guiding users on what to do next (I took some lessons from Twitter's onboarding), and following up via auto email if they still didn't get started. Copy made a big difference, too.
As a user, I find Quora to be weird and confusing. The sign up process was like a labyrinth, and trying to figure out how to use it is quite cumbersome.
I know this isn't exclusive to quora, but I really hate the "follow X topics/people/tags/boards that you probably don't even care about but we're going to force you to before we'll let you really use the app so our numbers look good" pattern.
That is a quite essential step for something like this. Take for example Twitter. If you signup for Twitter and don't follow anyone, it is going to be a pretty useless service to you. Same thing with Quora and many others, you need to have a starting point to see the value and start actually using it.
I might be a special case but I signed up for Twitter just so I could keep an eye on who is tweeting about my company and make an occasional reply. I don't follow anybody and wouldn't have finished the signup process if I was forced to follow someone. I find it a pretty great solution for real-time customer service, both as a founder and as a customer, but I don't want to hear everything anyone has to say unless they're a good friend of mine and in that case they are on Facebook. For notable people, if I care at all what they have been up to I will go to their blog, and for a real-time event I will simply search for it on Twitter.
The awesome thing about Twitter is they let me use their service exactly how I want to and don't force me to do anything else, like randomly click 5 topics I couldn't care less about. I wish Quora were similar in that respect.
Is there a Quora use-case I'm missing? What is the scenario where you wouldn't want to follow topics on Quora? Granted, I haven't been on Quora much over the last year, so things could have changed.
I think the issue people are encountering is trying to read an article linked from elsewhere (e.g. Twitter) and having to go through the full onboarding process to read it.
Hi! I'm the person who made the teardown. I tend to hate those too, but for some weird reason found myself enjoying this particular topic-picking experience. It might have been because it felt a lot less arbitrary than many others'.
It actually got me to stop using Quora. I signed up a few years back and enjoyed the weekly digest, which was often quite good at finding questions I might want to read. One day I'm asked to select 5 topics when all I want to do is read this post and there is no "skip" button. Something that was fun has now become work. I would even prefer a "pay $5 and skip this step" button.
I just don't like being forced to do things. Facebook wanted me to add some more info, which I hate, but at least they let me click 'next' a bunch of times and then it was over with.
Quora has done a good job figuring out what I like based on links I click from other sources, why do I have to tell them more? I wouldn't be annoyed by the topic page if it came up one time, I could click "skip" and it goes away forever.
I am not sure I would actually pay $5 to skip that page, I live perfectly fine without Quora, but I'd at least respect the "be annoyed or pay" attitude.
Having said all that, maybe this doesn't annoy many people and I'm simply a grumpy old-ish man.
Is anyone else having trouble reading the linked article or seeing the slides? I see page number 1/58 and the first slide is visible, I press the 'next' arrows and then everything is blank - just the page numbers change. I tried in both FF/Chrome.
Aah. Got it. The first image you've posted in the slideshow is hosted on amazon AWS, and all the other on google drive, which is blocked in my office. So your blog won't work in many offices.
Just this past weekend I clicked a google link to Quora and there were so many steps trying to get to the discussion and answer that I ultimately just closed the tab and went on to another search result. Horrible "onboarding" experience.
I'm glad to hear you like it! This is kind of a side project for me, and I haven't heard too much of a need for RSS, so I haven't set that up yet. I tweet all of the teardowns on Twitter at @UserOnboard, though.
I just want to echo how cool of a site this is. I'm actually not a designer at all(far from it, I do entirely backend work) but I've gone through most of your teardowns just because they're interesting to read and it's cool to learn about UX stuff like this.
The only comment I'd have is that I found the "zoom in on mouseover" to actually be really confusing at first, and I don't really get any utility from it. I suspect this is because I'm primarily interesting in what you have to say about the site, and not the zoomed-in details of a particular page.
Thanks for the feedback! The zoom tool just went out last night, and I don't think it's completely "there" yet. As a (former) developer myself, I'm really glad to hear it's interesting to non-designers, too!
I am a Quora member, but never ever read the site logged in. Instead I just suffix "?share=1". There's something about blurred content that requires me to 'unlock' it that just puts me off. Maybe it's the memory of Expert's Exchange.
me too, registered , logged once, got spammed,blocked it ,never returned on Quora. It could have been an interesting app, but they blew it for reasons i fail to understand.
can somebody tell me what quora.com is? is it like stackoverflow.com for programming only or for everything like yahoo answers? I don't want to sign up to find out. :)
1) "What was the most awesome thing a teacher ever told you?"
2) "Is coffee bad for you?"
3) "What is it like to live in Berlin?"
...
and so on.
The answers are usually very shallow essays instead of to the point, clear and competent answers. The search facilities on Quora are super-bad - it is virtually impossible to find something on there. The voting is as already mentioned a popularity contest.
In my opinion each end every Stackexchange web-site is more useful and (intellectually) entertaining than Quora which is indeed nothing else than a highbrow Yahoo! Answers.
It's a content site, so probably from pageviews with ads. I doubt Quora is going to stick around, and if it does it will be in there with about.com, ehow and the like. A scummy low quality crowd sourced content farm.
