I'm the Product Manager for the Q&A sites, so ultimately all this stuff is my responsibility.
The first thing I want to say is that I care very much what the community thinks about any new features or changes that we roll out to the network. I spend a good chunk of time every day sifting through meta so that I can make sure I understand where the pain points are. Just because you don't see me answering doesn't mean that I'm not there.
That said, with respect to the current discussion, I've read every answer and every comment. I can't say that I agree with everything, but I'm committed to taking constructive criticism and fixing things when we've made mistakes.
I sat down with Laura and Anna this morning, and we all agree that based on some of the points made here that the current help landing page design is not the best we can do. We clearly missed the browse use case that the old FAQ addressed.
But I'm not going to make any further changes until I completely understand the problem.
Therefore, it would be very helpful to hear from you guys about what specifically the new /about page fails at that the old FAQ page did successfully (the /about page was designed as a replacement for the FAQ, the primary purpose of the help center was just to move items out of long discussion threads on meta into a more readable and searchable format). After I've got that figured out, I'll sit down and see if I can come up with a layout that might work better.
Meanwhile, to address the concern about old FAQ magic links, I've posted the following idea on MSO to get feedback from the whole community (and I encourage you to go over there and put in your two cents): Redirect old magic [faq] links to /about instead of /help
Want to make it clear that I don't intend any insult by opening a thread on MSO. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of stack overflow, the stack exchange network used to be just one site. When more sites were added, there was never a canonical Meta created - so MSO became that. It's in the works to fix, but other things have taken priority.
What we ultimately decided to do
Some legitimate gripes raised here:
- The old [faq] magic links don't really work when forwarded to the new help center
- The about page puts the on and off topic information a bit too low on the page.
- The browsing use case for the help homepage isn't really as strong as it should be
Here's what we're going to do:
- All old [faq] links will now point to the about page. The about page was intended as a replacement for the FAQ, not the help homepage, and as you guys requested, the about page has the one-liner about who should post on the site at the top and the on and off topic reasons summarized on the page
- We will be moving up the on and off topic reasons for the about page to the second position instead of the fourth position. This is the first thing people will read after the box about this being a question and answer site
- We will move the asking box on the help homepage to the first position. The asking box contains the on and off topic articles and also the article about closing, which we think are the three most important articles. This change isn't as big as it could've been, but we did go back to the drawing board to see if we could get a better layout fairly easily, and everything that we came up with that we liked would require a pretty decent re-architecture of the section. I'm afraid we have to move on to other things at the moment.
