Stack Overflow Redesign: Questions

Question 1

This is the fourth post in our series discussing the redesign of Stack Overflow. If you haven’t yet, we recommend readingPart 1: A First Look: Stack Overflow redesign first, which explains the project's goals and scope.

We are now going to look at two of the most important parts of the Stack Overflow experience: the question list and the question page itself. This includes the post summary, the filters, and how they come together. Our primary goals here are to improve readability and make it faster to find and answer questions.

Updated Post Summary

This is one of the most viewed components on the site so we are approaching this change thoughtfully. We want to make it easier to quickly judge if a question is worth your time.

Current Post Summary:

New Post Summary:

What's changed and why:

Faster scanning: We’ve heard that it can feel cluttered or hard to spot relevant content. We believe this update makes it faster to parse a list of questions and identify ones that are relevant to you.
You’re in control of density: We are introducing a way to control the density so you are in control of how much information and space you need to browse. This component is currently in research, but we wanted to give you an early look.

We'd love your feedback: Does this new layout make it easier or harder to scan for questions? Is any critical information (votes, answer count, views) de-emphasized? What do you rely on most in the current layout that you’d want to ensure remains visible?

Updated Filters

We're updating the design of our filters to make them more intuitive and versatile.

Current Filter UI:

New Filter UI

What's changed and why:

Preserving functionality: The goal is to make the filter bar easier to use, while preserving all of the advanced filtering options. Custom filters will remain fully functional.
Clearer organization: “Sort” and “Filter” will appear as distinct components.
Improved visibility: Applied filters are now more clearly displayed so you can easily see how the list of questions is being narrowed down.

We'd love your feedback: Are there any filtering workflows you currently use that might be hindered by this design?

Bringing it all together: The Question List page

Here’s how the updated post summaries and new filter design look together on the main question list page

New Question List Page

Redesigned Question Page

The question page is the heart of the Stack Overflow. We’re refining key elements of the Q&A experience such as comments in order to encourage more conversation about potential solutions.

Current Question Page:

New Question Page:

What's changed and why:

Elevating content creators: We've moved the author's information to the top of the post to better highlight the value our content creators bring to the community.
Improving readability: The wider layout provides breathing room for those neurodiversity users who thrive from less distractions. This also sets us up to be able to include wider code blocks in the future.
Reducing clutter: Less frequently used action links (like "edit", "follow", and "share") have been moved into a "more" menu to reduce visual noise and keep the focus on the content itself.
Rethinking the accepted answer: We've heard that the accepted answer isn't always the best one. We are making the "accepted" badge more subtle to avoid giving it more visual weight than the top-voted answer from the community.
Making comments a conversation: We've reduced the dividers around comments to make them feel more like part of a conversation. This decision comes from our comments experiments where we saw a 30% increase in first time commenters. We are also exploring the idea of adding downvotes to comments.

Join the Conversation

We would greatly appreciate your feedback on these elements to help shape the future of Stack Overflow.

You can continue the discussion in our other posts:

Part 1:Introduction
Part 2:Color and Typography
Part 3:Navigation and Homepage
Part 4: Questions (you are here)
Part 5:User Profiles

Thank you for your input!

Question 2

Is thecode's line-height (source) intentional? Even the text isn't usingline-height: 2?!

Question 3

I see a lot of "2 hours ago", "1 day ago" etc in there... you're not going to cap it at "more than 1 year ago" like in the very unpopular new stackoverflow comments design, are you? Because knowinghow many years ago a question was posted is very often very useful contextual information

Question 4

Is SO intentionally trying to replicate Reddit UI as closely as possible? After looking at this sequence of posts I'm closer than ever to deleting all my SE profiles and never coming back...

Question 5

At the very least, put a tooltip to let me know the exact date and time. Also, the voting pill distracts from the post, and the author isn't very relevant, in fact you tell us not to judge posts based on the author!

Question 6

Faster scanning: We’ve heard that it can feel cluttered or hard to spot relevant content. We believe this update makes it faster to parse a list of questions and identify ones that are relevant to you.

Moving the post score, type, number of answers (if applicable), and acceptance status to theright makes it harder to skim, not easier.

When these stats are on the left, you can reasonably see the score and the title without moving your gaze too much horizontally, but you can just move vertically. With the stats on the right, you canma-a-aybe see the last few words of the title while you are looking at the score.

I do not see in the examples howanswer posts will be shown in lists. But same applies to those - having the type of the postto the left at the start of the title is vastly more useful.

Question 7

Research is wrapping up and aligning towards your same sentiment that the left is easier to scan so this will likely change either the as the default or as an option near the filters. We are exploring both as we finish research for this.

Question 8

@Piper I'm baffled by various things here. So SE feels the need to research if left or right is better (even though there is lots of prior art as well as design continuity to consider), then widely announces a design apparently before finishing that research, which is contrary to the existing design and the prior art and apparently also contrary to the research findings. That sounds to me that what is presented here is essentially an outdated prototype that SE already knows is obsolete... that's not a good look.

Question 9

@l4mpi We are attempting to share things early with you. In the future, we can absolutely wait until all of the work is done before sharing if that's what you prefer. I'd also like to remind you that NO research was done for the previous iteration of the post summary and resulted in one of the most downvoted posts of all time. So of course we did something contrary to that.

Question 10

@l4mpi We wanted to try the stats on the right side to give emphasis to the content while still ensuring that vote counts were easy to scan (aka not put them directly under the content like reddit, facebook, twitter, etc). We have a hypothesis that content will be given an equal chance at being viewed if we don't put voting numbers at the forefront, but still want to consider the needs of our power users by giving them a way to scan quickly. We have not disproven this hypothesis which is why it is still included in the mockup.

Question 11

@Piper thank you for the explanation. However, that hypothesis seems to entirely miss the point from my PoV. As an example, if a question is at -3 then you're correct that I don't want to look at it, but that is a feature not a bug, and a huge part the utility of downvotes. I might be more likely to look at it if I did not see the score, but then I would probably be annoyed that I wasted my time looking at a trash question. If you want to counteract that then you might as well disable voting entirely, because the only way it makes sense to me is if we assume the votes cannot be trusted.

Question 12

@Piper said differently, not all questions deserve anequal chance at being viewed. In an ideal world, a zero effort homework question or other low quality content would have a vastly lower chance of being looked at by experts, and a harder well researched question should have a higher chance. So if your goal is to give all posts an equal chance, then IMO that goal is bad and should be changed.

Question 13

SO is a Q&A site, and the votes on a question reflects thequality of the question. This is not social network sites where votes reflectpopularity or "likes". Please distinguish the two. In other words, SO copying the design of Reddit can make SO misses its own goal of being a Q&A.

Question 14

@Piper The idea that every post should have an"equal chance of being viewed" is fundamentally opposed to the concept of community curation; for that to be desirable entails that curation is undesirable. It's fundamentally opposed to what Stack Overflow is and what it's for. It would be hard to come up with five words that would give a worse impression of SO's understanding of their own site than"equal chance of being viewed". This isn't even the first time where SO are making changes according to a metric which valuesharm to the site.

Question 15

"We wanted to try the stats on the right side". That sounds like change for the sake of change. To make someone feel he added his touch.

Question 16

I feel like this undervalues curation.

An old user will know what to do. A new user might not, and worse, not get into the habit of flagging, editing, or closing.

While "less used" - having Edit be an obvious option has a fair amount of value. Wewant people editing posts and the option to be obvious.

Likewise, flagging is essential for curation, and having it 2 clicks away makes it less likely for folks to.

As much as slimming down the UI is 'nice' - people are not going to use tools they don't see.

I'd also wonder how moving these things will affect keyboard shortcuts for these tools. If you're changing navigation on a page, these might change as well. I currentlyheavily use them as part of my (tool assisted) moderation and metamoderation workflows.

Question 17

Keyboard moderation shortcuts are ESSENTIAL for some of the heavy duty moderation. If those do get modified, the moderators are going to need more than a little heads-up over it. If the new approach is going to make old approaches to moderation impossible without getting something better in return, people are going to be more than just a little miffed off.

Question 18

"I'd also wonder how moving these things will affect keyboard shortcuts for these tools." typically the keyboard shortcuts have a condition to be initialised. And that condition is typically the presence of an element on the page. If a shortcut can't find the element, it's not active. Thus, I'd expect keyboard shortcuts to be, let's say,adversely affected by this change. And given the track record of neglect the keyboard shortcut feature has, I doubt anything was considered here. Hopefully, your reminder is taken into account and not to the rubbish bin.

Question 19

Well, the shortcuts are a very big reason I've been able to handle spam waves of 300-400 posts in a day. As I said elsewhere - if I get a big spam wave, I'd like to not die handling it. Right now, SE's shortcuts handle 90% of what I'd like them to, and I'm finding more useful things over time. It is a VERY well designed system with parts of the site that have not changed much, and essential for my workflow

Question 20

This is great feedback. Let me take this back to the team. Thank you

Question 21

I'd go so far as to say that these actions are at least on par if not MORE important than the ability to comment. I'd much rather get a suggested edit from a newbie than a comment pointing out a typo or update, etc. CC @Piper

Question 22

I find the post summary significantly harder to parse. It's the exact sort of UI that would make me write a userscript to modify it. The biggest problems I see are:

Distinguishing titles by color is easy to scan. The brain is good at doing that. With the new design, I have to scan based on "slightly larger and more bold", which takes a lot more mental effort.
The lines between the entries have been removed, which were another subtle visual clue that your eyes would use to locate individual entries on the page. Now, when I read a title and am not interested in that entry, it takes a lot more active reading in order to locate the start of the next list item.
The top line of each entry is the user name/image, view count, and age. That's theleast valuable information in each entry. When I'm looking at this view, I'm most interested in understanding what each entry isabout. Whether or not I answer a question is based on whether it's a topic I feel like I know something about. Who asked the question never enters into the equation. At least itshouldn't. When you put the user name/avatar first, it's just extraneous information that I now have to actively filter out. It's now the only colorful part of the entry, so the eye is naturally drawn there.

The new Question page suffers many of the same problems.

The lack of bounding lines means it's easy to read past the end of an answer and into the comments without realizing it.
Placing colorful user information at the top of a drab, black-and-white answer draws the eye to the least meaningful part of the answer.
Placing the "Accepted Answer" flag next to the user info like that makes it look like it's talking about theuser and not the answer.
Someone with a username of "Accepted Answer" and a profile picture of a green checkbox could mislead lots of users who aren't familiar with the details of the new UI.
There's not much room (especially on mobile) to add a second user's entry above the answer when they've edited it.

In general, I think the elevation of the user's identity to such a place of prominence is a significant mistake. On this site, it's the quality of the content that matters. Who wrote that content is largely irrelevant. I don't care if it's your first day here or if you're Jon Skeet. If you provide a good quality answer, you get an upvote. That's the way it's supposed to work. When you elevate identity like that, you'll force people to start paying attention to it and thus factor it into things (whether they realize they're doing it or not). People may get discriminated against because of their username or avatar. Users with low rep may be less likely to get votes because people see the low rep and then skip the answer without giving it a chance. Lead with the content first, then put the attribution after the end. Literature has done it that way for centuries, and that's on purpose. Let the reader evaluate the content on its own merits. When you put the author first, you're priming the reader's mind with expectations and presuppositions. You do a disservice to both the author and the reader.

Question 23

I could not agree more with the last paragraph. At the same time, we cannot ignore that the content-first approach, the sole reason this place exists, has been kept in the back seat in favor of bringing in new users and "increasing engagement". Facebook has so many more <s>jucy ad viewers</s> users than SO, and on Facebook you are valuable as long as you spend time on the website, regardless of how low quality what you are posting there is. It really helps tickling those users' ego to increase engagement. So I think this vanity change has an increased chance of making it to the final version.

Question 24

@GSerg I was hoping they would read that with a mind towards their recent efforts to be "more welcoming". This change would seem to fly in the face of all of that.

Question 25

Have you done much user-testing of wireframes yet with first time users? Even just some quick and dirty "guerrilla testing" with 2-3 random people like your partner / relative / friendly shop or canteen worker, etc?

Because while there's a lot of nice stuff aesthetically (e.g. I like the neatly contained voting pills), looking at this has me worried:

First of all, I have no idea if the "Reply" button under the question would create acomment or ananswer (I guess it's a comment, because I don't see another way to comment?).

But more importantly, I'd bet that most new users seeing this would understand that the "Reply" button isthe way to reply to a question (why would there be some other, better form of reply hidden further down the page?), and so of course, these "replies" under the Reply button must be the only type of content answering the question; so:

if they know the answer to the question, they'll use the "Reply" button to post it instead of looking for the answers box (i.e. answers in comments, which is bad because it further breaks the "beat answer floats to the top" USP)
they'll get bogged down reading question comments (whereas we typically skim over the clearly-secondary comments to the clearly-primary answers, unless a particular comment stands out). While important, question comments are usually not very useful to people in problem-solving mode who landed here from search (e.g. "is this on topic" debates, clarifications of minor details of the asker's scenario, jokes, opinions, asides, etc)
many will never scroll down far enough to see that there even are another type of "replies" called answers. They'll see the replies end, then there's a break, another big vote chip that looks like the question at the top of the page, and it looks like a change in topic

The distinction between small, disposable, easy-to-ignore comments and big, detailed, quality-controlled answers was ahuge factor in Stack Overflow replacing forums as the place to solve coding problems, and is a major part of the appeal of the wider network for those of us who use it. Being able to skim past pages of the "Why are you even using that, bro" nonsense that plagued forums and get straight to an on-topic, well-structured couple of paragraphs thatactually solves the problem was an absolute revelation. I'm worried this will be a big step in the wrong direction and in future, the quality answers (if there are any) will be buried in a nested comment thread, smothered by the kind of fluff we thought we got rid of.

Also, while I've never formally UX-tested SO or SE, I have watched first-time-user colleagues try to figure out the less-famous technical SE sites, and you'd be surprised how many people don't even make it to the answers section in the current designs. I've seen people click onto an SE page that I know has the answer to their problem, start reading the question, and give up around paragraph 3 or after skimming the question comments because they wrongly assumed they'd landed on a personal blog or Medium-like site, where one person was venting about their problem into the void. This makes it look even more like that.

Why would a first-time user keep scrolling down, once they've read all the "replies"?

And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like contentliterally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed?

Maybe I should ask that as a question.

...because it's a follow-up question, and as we all know, follow-up questions are best asked as new, linked questions so they aren't lost halfway down some other thread and get eyeballs from more people with interests more directly relevant to the follow-up question (wedo all know that here, don't we, staff?).

Question 26

I think you should ask that follow-up question.

Question 27

A "skip to answers" link before the comments (or after the first paragraph of the question itself) might help. (Since the team doing says they'll read all the feedback, I think it makes more sense to thread this with your answer than to break it out.)

Question 28

Edit

It is already quite difficult for new users to find theEdit button because it is not a button, but just a word. This typically encourages the following:

posting code samples and clarifications in comments, not infrequently split across multiple comments due to length limits;
posting samples and clarifications as answers;
asking a new question to replace the old one, with or without deletion of the original.

Making theEdit button less visible on the grounds that it is less used is ... a little bit strange. If it is even less visible, I'm sure it will be even less used.

As somebody who has found the edit button, I use it alot. Posts of new users frequently require markup changes to format code correctly, for instance, or to make pictures show or to correct links.

From time to time, moreover, mass editing has been required on TeX SE and small groups of users have been responsible for correcting hundreds or thousands of posts after a previous site update rendered working code samples unusable.

Making it harder to improve existing posts is a really odd thing to do. Improving both questions and answers should be regarded as a high-value activity. It deserves to be accorded a prominence which reflects that value.

Remember that the majority of these improvements (at least on sites like TeX SE) are made by people who do not get points or badges or privileges as a result. Making it more difficult for them to help the moderators sends an unfortunate message.

Flag

Similar remarks apply to flagging. I do not use this very often, but there are times when I use it repeatedly because, say, somebody is continuously creating new sock puppets or continuously posting spam.

Moreover, flagging should be easily visible, regardless of how frequently it is required. If somebody becomes abusive, it is important that a current visual element clearly signals a way to request moderator intervention. That should never be hidden in some further menu, regardless of how frequently it is needed, because it is of great importance it be easily accessible when it is needed. A new user, especially, who cannot see this option at once is more likely to respond, potentially escalating the situation, or to simply leave.

Question 29

Re: flagging visibility, it's also very important that every reader, before they even become a contributor of any kind, gets the message "not all is tolerated here".

Question 30

@nitsua60 Agreed. Originally, I said something like that, but I thought the post was too long already and I'm not sure whether it actually has any deterrent effect, whereas the other points I actually know to be true.

Question 31

that's a fair point. Having been a mod, I'm keen to have us signal norms as frequently and visibly as possible, but I've got no way to know whether it ever helped prevent a single bad action :shrug:

Question 32

@nitsua60: Absolutely. On sites/platforms where it's not easy and obvious how to report rule violations/inappropriate behavior, it feels like a signal that the platform doesn't care about enforcing such rules. That feeling makes me not want to be on those platforms, because it's not worth the stress of dealing with problem users on those platforms and being left to fend for myself.

Question 33

@V2Blast absolutely. To paraphrase my (long time ago) nomination questionnaire, it'sseeing community standards upheld that does so much to make this a place that feels worth contributing to, which then creates the library with such high SNR.

Question 34

The problem with new users not finding the Edit "button" has been known since Ancient Times. We have theedit magic link to help direct such people, but I agree that an actual Edit button would be a considerable improvement.

Question 35

@PM2Ring Which is why hiding the link seems a less than ideal solution to its not being used.

Question 36

Hiding the share and edit feature (though in your images share is shown) feels like a very poor idea; I would say that edit and share are items I usevery often. Editing a post to improve it, especially soon after it's posted, is really important to ensure it's well received; hiding that feature away is going to make itharder for users to get an author to improve their post when they can't even work out where the feature is now hidden away.

On the new filter UI, I hope is supports wildcards; staging ground doesn't and it's frustrating to use for someone who has a lot of wildcard in their custom filter preferences.

Question 37

Would you say it's more important for a question than answer or equally important?

Question 38

@Piper: The Edit button is probably equally important for questions and answers. Both post types benefit from edits to improve them.

Question 39

@Piper Especially on SO edits are becoming more important. On several occasion it has been mentioned that SO needs to switch to a more curation focused approach. Editing is part of it, E.g. We have old answers that need updating. Incoming questions from users that dont know how to properly ask etc. Over 1/3 of my reputation points on SO comes from edits alone.

Question 40

I have to say, Idespise "Reply" as a prompt to comment. I hope this isn't a done-deal that I missed along the way. I guess it's an outgrowth of the stated desire to favor discussion (implicitly: over SNR)?

I appreciate that you've laid out the many, varied changes in a thoughtful way. I appreciate that you're bringing ideas to the table early. Make chat work better, make workshopping areas... just please don't turn a high-quality reference library into just another yammering, threaded, internet pandaemonium.

Question 41

Elevating content creators: We've moved the author's information to the top of the post to better highlight the value our content creators bring to the community.

I disagree. You've removed everything except the name. The current way it's done shows user reputation as well as badge counts. The new one hides a small avatar and user name at the top of a post.

Additionally, with the ad, most users will ignore information around the ad. The avatar is above the title of the question - which the user likely saw either on the page that brought them here, or in a search result, so it's ignored. It's also close enough to the ad that I ignored it on a first and second pass when looking at the screenshots.

If you want to elevate the content creators, don't shrink their name to be the size of the tags and remove their reputation and achievements.

Question 42

I honestly didn’t even notice that they moved it, but yea placing it up top is gonna get it ignored every time. The content is king, the author should be at the bottom as to not even begin to allow users to pre-judge the post by its author.

Question 43

+1 the time I most often look at the user chip is when I'm about torespond; if they're lower-rep I'll take that into account (e.g. I'll be more likely to include tips like how to format or edit a post in comments, and slightly more detailed explanations); if they're high rep I'll be extra attentive to details in their question to avoid posting a naive answer they clearly already tried. And didn't SE specifically add things like a "New user, be nice!" chip to encourage us to take the user's experience into account when posting? Hiding their rep seems an odd reversal.

Question 44

Could we have the big search bar back?

We have a lot of knowledge already on the site, we must encourage users to find it (instead of making duplicates). Design can help with that: A big central search bar emphasises the importance of that frequent use item.

It should not be tucked away to a corner as with the current design proposal.

Below is a rough draft of how I think it should look like:

SO specifically seems to be in need to shift to "curate and update" instead of primary making new content. Therefore not only the search but also the edit & flag function should be put more in focus, not just in optimizing the workflow but also in the design philosophy (see alsoLarnus' answer,Journeyman Geeks' orcfrs' answer).

Question 45

While I get the attempt to make comments a first class citizen - many of the current initiatives, removing visual barriers and making them the same size as regular posts does not really work well in practice for a regular user.

Ido think these are smaller, but consider how long comment threads are clutter, could we have a way to 'fold' them down if you're removing visual separators from them?

Question 46

it also feels like share and rely, in the comments section, is more prominent than everything else on the page other than the ads.

Question 47

Oh yes. This makes sense!

Question 48

I don't know how other people feel but I think we should try to keep user reputation and badge counts. If not on the question list page, then at least on the individual question pages. For one thing, I think having badges and reputation acts as a indicator of experience. The second reason is that the question page is one of the only places where reputation and badges are visible. If we are not showing them anymore, then what's the purpose of them?

I think there is enough room to show an abbreviated rep count (i.e. 1k) and badge counts inline between the display name and the relative post time.

Question 49

Thanks for raising this! We’re exploring an approach where reputation and badges appear on hover instead of inline. A few questions for you: In what situations do you reference those details on the question page? Would seeing them only on hover still support that use case?

Question 50

@EmmaBee I think I reference those details when I am viewing an answer to a question that is also of interest to me. I want to know the experience level of the person contributing the answer. For your second question, I think I would still prefer to see the information without any interaction. As mentioned, I think it's important for people to "show off" their achievements from their participation. If it's not immediately visible I think it would turn off some people from participating.

Question 51

Appreciate the follow up! Sounds like it’s most important for answers - and fair point about people wanting to show off 🙂. You might have seen in the mock-ups that we also removed rep and badges from the QUESTION author on the list page. Do you think that change matters as much, or mainly for answers?

Question 52

@EmmaBee Well I think I would still prefer to show the information for question authors on theindividual question pages (for showing off as mentioned). But I think that information doesn't matter as much on the questionlist page. But it's still a nice-to-have.

Question 53

@EmmaBee Hover isuseless for people using phones and other touchscreen devices.

Question 54

@EmmaBee I disagree with Cave Johnson a bit and think rep should be on the questions list as well. I care less about the specific value and more about the user having any significant rep, as being new and/or not contributing any other positive things is one additional factor besides the question title/tags/snippet to identify problematic content (e.g. off-topic or LQ posts or spam). And please don't make it hover-only on the questions list as that basically makes it impossible to scan.

Question 55

@EmmaBee it's extremely important to keep rep and badges shown both on questions and answers, it's my experience that an established user asking a Q is much more likely attract interest because you can count on the user to follow site etiquette, that goes from up-voting&accepting an answer - thus rewarding the answerer, to correctly asking an on-topic answerable question, to everything else that goes into creating a successful Q&A pair. If you're removing rep&badges from view in the listing you're taking away the main way individual accounts advertise themselves seeking help.

Question 56

@EmmaBee every time you answer a question from a low-rep inexperienced user you've significantly increased the risk of not getting rewarded, not getting feedback, not receiving correct site etiquette in the interaction, and in both cases I'll carefully check the profile before wasting my time elaborating complicated answers to avoid the frustration that often follows. Hence, by removing rep&badges you've just hidden the main form of enticement and distinction. I might take time to check the question of an established expert even if I don't have time.

Question 57

@bad_coder I can see where you’re coming from - rep can make it easier to spot people who understand how the site works. At the same time, one of Stack Overflow’s strengths has always been helping people learn how to contribute well, even if they’re newer. So we’re thinking carefully about how to support both experienced contributors and newcomers who are still building that track record. I'll share this feedback with the team!

Question 58

@EmmaBee Hover would be worse. I don't need that information until I'm already thinking about the question/answer at least a little bit, so it can be at the end, it can be small, it can be abbreviated ... but if I have to aim and hover, I might as well just open their user page. (One additional use case is when I am researching something I don't understand, and the answer seems a bit off ... if the user has over 1000 reputation, it is probably me that missed something crucial and they might clarify if I ask carefully.)

Question 59

There are some words there. Most of the highlighted ones, I can barely see - two are basically invisible. And the highlighting blends inway too much with the text.

Question 60

This has been fixed

Question 61

The code highlighting in dark mode doesn’t have nearly enough contrast, and is way too dark.

Question 62

Yeah, these aren't right. This falls under that "our mockups aren't perfect because we wanted you to see them early" disclaimer

Question 63

Why are the voting buttons so...fat? The background doesn't need to be that big.

Question 64

Making the custom filters not a vertical list any more, but a series of badges, is horrible as an overview.

The custom filters in the mockup are is not even sorted alphabetically. And even if they were, a vertical list is easier to skim for updates.

Adding a new custom filter will also not cause the "Jenga tower" of custom filters to reshuffle and then push things on new places. If a filter was on the third row at the end, it might now end up on the start of the fourth row.

VLAZ 23.1k3 gold badges51 silver badges125 bronze badges · Answer 1 · 2025-10-06 17:29:30Z

71

Faster scanning: We’ve heard that it can feel cluttered or hard to spot relevant content. We believe this update makes it faster to parse a list of questions and identify ones that are relevant to you.

Moving the post score, type, number of answers (if applicable), and acceptance status to theright makes it harder to skim, not easier.

When these stats are on the left, you can reasonably see the score and the title without moving your gaze too much horizontally, but you can just move vertically. With the stats on the right, you canma-a-aybe see the last few words of the title while you are looking at the score.

I do not see in the examples howanswer posts will be shown in lists. But same applies to those - having the type of the postto the left at the start of the title is vastly more useful.

Share

Improve this answer

answeredOct 6 at 17:29

VLAZ

23.1k3 gold badges51 silver badges125 bronze badges

9

22
Research is wrapping up and aligning towards your same sentiment that the left is easier to scan so this will likely change either the as the default or as an option near the filters. We are exploring both as we finish research for this.
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-06 18:20:23 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 18:20
13
@Piper I'm baffled by various things here. So SE feels the need to research if left or right is better (even though there is lots of prior art as well as design continuity to consider), then widely announces a design apparently before finishing that research, which is contrary to the existing design and the prior art and apparently also contrary to the research findings. That sounds to me that what is presented here is essentially an outdated prototype that SE already knows is obsolete... that's not a good look.
l4mpi
– l4mpi
2025-10-07 08:19:27 +00:00
CommentedOct 7 at 8:19
9
@l4mpi We are attempting to share things early with you. In the future, we can absolutely wait until all of the work is done before sharing if that's what you prefer. I'd also like to remind you that NO research was done for the previous iteration of the post summary and resulted in one of the most downvoted posts of all time. So of course we did something contrary to that.
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-07 14:16:16 +00:00
CommentedOct 7 at 14:16
6
@l4mpi We wanted to try the stats on the right side to give emphasis to the content while still ensuring that vote counts were easy to scan (aka not put them directly under the content like reddit, facebook, twitter, etc). We have a hypothesis that content will be given an equal chance at being viewed if we don't put voting numbers at the forefront, but still want to consider the needs of our power users by giving them a way to scan quickly. We have not disproven this hypothesis which is why it is still included in the mockup.
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-07 16:43:30 +00:00
CommentedOct 7 at 16:43
8
@Piper thank you for the explanation. However, that hypothesis seems to entirely miss the point from my PoV. As an example, if a question is at -3 then you're correct that I don't want to look at it, but that is a feature not a bug, and a huge part the utility of downvotes. I might be more likely to look at it if I did not see the score, but then I would probably be annoyed that I wasted my time looking at a trash question. If you want to counteract that then you might as well disable voting entirely, because the only way it makes sense to me is if we assume the votes cannot be trusted.
l4mpi
– l4mpi
2025-10-08 08:10:28 +00:00
CommentedOct 8 at 8:10
13
@Piper said differently, not all questions deserve anequal chance at being viewed. In an ideal world, a zero effort homework question or other low quality content would have a vastly lower chance of being looked at by experts, and a harder well researched question should have a higher chance. So if your goal is to give all posts an equal chance, then IMO that goal is bad and should be changed.
l4mpi
– l4mpi
2025-10-08 08:14:15 +00:00
CommentedOct 8 at 8:14
7
SO is a Q&A site, and the votes on a question reflects thequality of the question. This is not social network sites where votes reflectpopularity or "likes". Please distinguish the two. In other words, SO copying the design of Reddit can make SO misses its own goal of being a Q&A.
Explorer09
– Explorer09
2025-10-10 14:35:06 +00:00
CommentedOct 10 at 14:35
7
@Piper The idea that every post should have an"equal chance of being viewed" is fundamentally opposed to the concept of community curation; for that to be desirable entails that curation is undesirable. It's fundamentally opposed to what Stack Overflow is and what it's for. It would be hard to come up with five words that would give a worse impression of SO's understanding of their own site than"equal chance of being viewed". This isn't even the first time where SO are making changes according to a metric which valuesharm to the site.
kaya3
– kaya3
2025-10-10 17:59:23 +00:00
CommentedOct 10 at 17:59
1
"We wanted to try the stats on the right side". That sounds like change for the sake of change. To make someone feel he added his touch.
Florian F
– Florian F
2025-10-13 18:28:34 +00:00
CommentedOct 13 at 18:28

Add a comment |

Journeyman Geek 218k52 gold badges408 silver badges899 bronze badges · Answer 2 · 2025-10-06 18:01:14Z

49

I feel like this undervalues curation.

An old user will know what to do. A new user might not, and worse, not get into the habit of flagging, editing, or closing.

While "less used" - having Edit be an obvious option has a fair amount of value. Wewant people editing posts and the option to be obvious.

Likewise, flagging is essential for curation, and having it 2 clicks away makes it less likely for folks to.

As much as slimming down the UI is 'nice' - people are not going to use tools they don't see.

I'd also wonder how moving these things will affect keyboard shortcuts for these tools. If you're changing navigation on a page, these might change as well. I currentlyheavily use them as part of my (tool assisted) moderation and metamoderation workflows.

3,9682 gold badges8 silver badges36 bronze badges

answeredOct 6 at 16:48

Journeyman Geek

218k52 gold badges408 silver badges899 bronze badges

5

13
Keyboard moderation shortcuts are ESSENTIAL for some of the heavy duty moderation. If those do get modified, the moderators are going to need more than a little heads-up over it. If the new approach is going to make old approaches to moderation impossible without getting something better in return, people are going to be more than just a little miffed off.
Mast
– Mast
2025-10-06 17:34:15 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 17:34
2
"I'd also wonder how moving these things will affect keyboard shortcuts for these tools." typically the keyboard shortcuts have a condition to be initialised. And that condition is typically the presence of an element on the page. If a shortcut can't find the element, it's not active. Thus, I'd expect keyboard shortcuts to be, let's say,adversely affected by this change. And given the track record of neglect the keyboard shortcut feature has, I doubt anything was considered here. Hopefully, your reminder is taken into account and not to the rubbish bin.
VLAZ
– VLAZ
2025-10-06 17:43:04 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 17:43
2
Well, the shortcuts are a very big reason I've been able to handle spam waves of 300-400 posts in a day. As I said elsewhere - if I get a big spam wave, I'd like to not die handling it. Right now, SE's shortcuts handle 90% of what I'd like them to, and I'm finding more useful things over time. It is a VERY well designed system with parts of the site that have not changed much, and essential for my workflow
Journeyman Geek
– Journeyman Geek
2025-10-06 17:51:43 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 17:51
11
This is great feedback. Let me take this back to the team. Thank you
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-06 18:14:35 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 18:14
3
I'd go so far as to say that these actions are at least on par if not MORE important than the ability to comment. I'd much rather get a suggested edit from a newbie than a comment pointing out a typo or update, etc. CC @Piper
Robotnik
– Robotnik
2025-10-10 11:26:26 +00:00
CommentedOct 10 at 11:26

Add a comment |

bta 5,5611 gold badge24 silver badges23 bronze badges · Answer 3 · 2025-10-07 01:14:35Z

I find the post summary significantly harder to parse. It's the exact sort of UI that would make me write a userscript to modify it. The biggest problems I see are:

Distinguishing titles by color is easy to scan. The brain is good at doing that. With the new design, I have to scan based on "slightly larger and more bold", which takes a lot more mental effort.
The lines between the entries have been removed, which were another subtle visual clue that your eyes would use to locate individual entries on the page. Now, when I read a title and am not interested in that entry, it takes a lot more active reading in order to locate the start of the next list item.
The top line of each entry is the user name/image, view count, and age. That's theleast valuable information in each entry. When I'm looking at this view, I'm most interested in understanding what each entry isabout. Whether or not I answer a question is based on whether it's a topic I feel like I know something about. Who asked the question never enters into the equation. At least itshouldn't. When you put the user name/avatar first, it's just extraneous information that I now have to actively filter out. It's now the only colorful part of the entry, so the eye is naturally drawn there.

The new Question page suffers many of the same problems.

The lack of bounding lines means it's easy to read past the end of an answer and into the comments without realizing it.
Placing colorful user information at the top of a drab, black-and-white answer draws the eye to the least meaningful part of the answer.
Placing the "Accepted Answer" flag next to the user info like that makes it look like it's talking about theuser and not the answer.
Someone with a username of "Accepted Answer" and a profile picture of a green checkbox could mislead lots of users who aren't familiar with the details of the new UI.
There's not much room (especially on mobile) to add a second user's entry above the answer when they've edited it.

In general, I think the elevation of the user's identity to such a place of prominence is a significant mistake. On this site, it's the quality of the content that matters. Who wrote that content is largely irrelevant. I don't care if it's your first day here or if you're Jon Skeet. If you provide a good quality answer, you get an upvote. That's the way it's supposed to work. When you elevate identity like that, you'll force people to start paying attention to it and thus factor it into things (whether they realize they're doing it or not). People may get discriminated against because of their username or avatar. Users with low rep may be less likely to get votes because people see the low rep and then skip the answer without giving it a chance. Lead with the content first, then put the attribution after the end. Literature has done it that way for centuries, and that's on purpose. Let the reader evaluate the content on its own merits. When you put the author first, you're priming the reader's mind with expectations and presuppositions. You do a disservice to both the author and the reader.

I could not agree more with the last paragraph. At the same time, we cannot ignore that the content-first approach, the sole reason this place exists, has been kept in the back seat in favor of bringing in new users and "increasing engagement". Facebook has so many more <s>jucy ad viewers</s> users than SO, and on Facebook you are valuable as long as you spend time on the website, regardless of how low quality what you are posting there is. It really helps tickling those users' ego to increase engagement. So I think this vanity change has an increased chance of making it to the final version.
@GSerg I was hoping they would read that with a mind towards their recent efforts to be "more welcoming". This change would seem to fly in the face of all of that.

user56reinstatemonica8 8,5202 gold badges37 silver badges45 bronze badges · Answer 4 · 2025-10-08 08:46:31Z

Have you done much user-testing of wireframes yet with first time users? Even just some quick and dirty "guerrilla testing" with 2-3 random people like your partner / relative / friendly shop or canteen worker, etc?

Because while there's a lot of nice stuff aesthetically (e.g. I like the neatly contained voting pills), looking at this has me worried:

First of all, I have no idea if the "Reply" button under the question would create acomment or ananswer (I guess it's a comment, because I don't see another way to comment?).

But more importantly, I'd bet that most new users seeing this would understand that the "Reply" button isthe way to reply to a question (why would there be some other, better form of reply hidden further down the page?), and so of course, these "replies" under the Reply button must be the only type of content answering the question; so:

if they know the answer to the question, they'll use the "Reply" button to post it instead of looking for the answers box (i.e. answers in comments, which is bad because it further breaks the "beat answer floats to the top" USP)
they'll get bogged down reading question comments (whereas we typically skim over the clearly-secondary comments to the clearly-primary answers, unless a particular comment stands out). While important, question comments are usually not very useful to people in problem-solving mode who landed here from search (e.g. "is this on topic" debates, clarifications of minor details of the asker's scenario, jokes, opinions, asides, etc)
many will never scroll down far enough to see that there even are another type of "replies" called answers. They'll see the replies end, then there's a break, another big vote chip that looks like the question at the top of the page, and it looks like a change in topic

The distinction between small, disposable, easy-to-ignore comments and big, detailed, quality-controlled answers was ahuge factor in Stack Overflow replacing forums as the place to solve coding problems, and is a major part of the appeal of the wider network for those of us who use it. Being able to skim past pages of the "Why are you even using that, bro" nonsense that plagued forums and get straight to an on-topic, well-structured couple of paragraphs thatactually solves the problem was an absolute revelation. I'm worried this will be a big step in the wrong direction and in future, the quality answers (if there are any) will be buried in a nested comment thread, smothered by the kind of fluff we thought we got rid of.

Also, while I've never formally UX-tested SO or SE, I have watched first-time-user colleagues try to figure out the less-famous technical SE sites, and you'd be surprised how many people don't even make it to the answers section in the current designs. I've seen people click onto an SE page that I know has the answer to their problem, start reading the question, and give up around paragraph 3 or after skimming the question comments because they wrongly assumed they'd landed on a personal blog or Medium-like site, where one person was venting about their problem into the void. This makes it look even more like that.

Why would a first-time user keep scrolling down, once they've read all the "replies"?

And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like contentliterally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed?

Maybe I should ask that as a question.

...because it's a follow-up question, and as we all know, follow-up questions are best asked as new, linked questions so they aren't lost halfway down some other thread and get eyeballs from more people with interests more directly relevant to the follow-up question (wedo all know that here, don't we, staff?).

A "skip to answers" link before the comments (or after the first paragraph of the question itself) might help. (Since the team doing says they'll read all the feedback, I think it makes more sense to thread this with your answer than to break it out.)

cfr 4653 silver badges7 bronze badges · Answer 5 · 2025-10-07 03:53:23Z

Edit

It is already quite difficult for new users to find theEdit button because it is not a button, but just a word. This typically encourages the following:

posting code samples and clarifications in comments, not infrequently split across multiple comments due to length limits;
posting samples and clarifications as answers;
asking a new question to replace the old one, with or without deletion of the original.

Making theEdit button less visible on the grounds that it is less used is ... a little bit strange. If it is even less visible, I'm sure it will be even less used.

As somebody who has found the edit button, I use it alot. Posts of new users frequently require markup changes to format code correctly, for instance, or to make pictures show or to correct links.

From time to time, moreover, mass editing has been required on TeX SE and small groups of users have been responsible for correcting hundreds or thousands of posts after a previous site update rendered working code samples unusable.

Making it harder to improve existing posts is a really odd thing to do. Improving both questions and answers should be regarded as a high-value activity. It deserves to be accorded a prominence which reflects that value.

Remember that the majority of these improvements (at least on sites like TeX SE) are made by people who do not get points or badges or privileges as a result. Making it more difficult for them to help the moderators sends an unfortunate message.

Flag

Similar remarks apply to flagging. I do not use this very often, but there are times when I use it repeatedly because, say, somebody is continuously creating new sock puppets or continuously posting spam.

Moreover, flagging should be easily visible, regardless of how frequently it is required. If somebody becomes abusive, it is important that a current visual element clearly signals a way to request moderator intervention. That should never be hidden in some further menu, regardless of how frequently it is needed, because it is of great importance it be easily accessible when it is needed. A new user, especially, who cannot see this option at once is more likely to respond, potentially escalating the situation, or to simply leave.

Re: flagging visibility, it's also very important that every reader, before they even become a contributor of any kind, gets the message "not all is tolerated here".
@nitsua60 Agreed. Originally, I said something like that, but I thought the post was too long already and I'm not sure whether it actually has any deterrent effect, whereas the other points I actually know to be true.
that's a fair point. Having been a mod, I'm keen to have us signal norms as frequently and visibly as possible, but I've got no way to know whether it ever helped prevent a single bad action :shrug:
@nitsua60: Absolutely. On sites/platforms where it's not easy and obvious how to report rule violations/inappropriate behavior, it feels like a signal that the platform doesn't care about enforcing such rules. That feeling makes me not want to be on those platforms, because it's not worth the stress of dealing with problem users on those platforms and being left to fend for myself.
@V2Blast absolutely. To paraphrase my (long time ago) nomination questionnaire, it'sseeing community standards upheld that does so much to make this a place that feels worth contributing to, which then creates the library with such high SNR.
The problem with new users not finding the Edit "button" has been known since Ancient Times. We have theedit magic link to help direct such people, but I agree that an actual Edit button would be a considerable improvement.
@PM2Ring Which is why hiding the link seems a less than ideal solution to its not being used.

Larnu 2,2259 silver badges22 bronze badges · Answer 6 · 2025-10-06 16:47:40Z

Hiding the share and edit feature (though in your images share is shown) feels like a very poor idea; I would say that edit and share are items I usevery often. Editing a post to improve it, especially soon after it's posted, is really important to ensure it's well received; hiding that feature away is going to make itharder for users to get an author to improve their post when they can't even work out where the feature is now hidden away.

On the new filter UI, I hope is supports wildcards; staging ground doesn't and it's frustrating to use for someone who has a lot of wildcard in their custom filter preferences.

Would you say it's more important for a question than answer or equally important?
@Piper: The Edit button is probably equally important for questions and answers. Both post types benefit from edits to improve them.
@Piper Especially on SO edits are becoming more important. On several occasion it has been mentioned that SO needs to switch to a more curation focused approach. Editing is part of it, E.g. We have old answers that need updating. Incoming questions from users that dont know how to properly ask etc. Over 1/3 of my reputation points on SO comes from edits alone.

nitsua60 4,28219 silver badges22 bronze badges · Answer 7 · 2025-10-07 01:47:33Z

I have to say, Idespise "Reply" as a prompt to comment. I hope this isn't a done-deal that I missed along the way. I guess it's an outgrowth of the stated desire to favor discussion (implicitly: over SNR)?

I appreciate that you've laid out the many, varied changes in a thoughtful way. I appreciate that you're bringing ideas to the table early. Make chat work better, make workshopping areas... just please don't turn a high-quality reference library into just another yammering, threaded, internet pandaemonium.

Andy 22.1k15 gold badges53 silver badges92 bronze badges · Answer 8 · 2025-10-07 21:48:53Z

Elevating content creators: We've moved the author's information to the top of the post to better highlight the value our content creators bring to the community.

I disagree. You've removed everything except the name. The current way it's done shows user reputation as well as badge counts. The new one hides a small avatar and user name at the top of a post.

Additionally, with the ad, most users will ignore information around the ad. The avatar is above the title of the question - which the user likely saw either on the page that brought them here, or in a search result, so it's ignored. It's also close enough to the ad that I ignored it on a first and second pass when looking at the screenshots.

If you want to elevate the content creators, don't shrink their name to be the size of the tags and remove their reputation and achievements.

I honestly didn’t even notice that they moved it, but yea placing it up top is gonna get it ignored every time. The content is king, the author should be at the bottom as to not even begin to allow users to pre-judge the post by its author.
+1 the time I most often look at the user chip is when I'm about torespond; if they're lower-rep I'll take that into account (e.g. I'll be more likely to include tips like how to format or edit a post in comments, and slightly more detailed explanations); if they're high rep I'll be extra attentive to details in their question to avoid posting a naive answer they clearly already tried. And didn't SE specifically add things like a "New user, be nice!" chip to encourage us to take the user's experience into account when posting? Hiding their rep seems an odd reversal.

B-Tech 7,21311 silver badges45 bronze badges · Answer 9 · 2025-10-07 10:16:34Z

Could we have the big search bar back?

We have a lot of knowledge already on the site, we must encourage users to find it (instead of making duplicates). Design can help with that: A big central search bar emphasises the importance of that frequent use item.

It should not be tucked away to a corner as with the current design proposal.

Below is a rough draft of how I think it should look like:

SO specifically seems to be in need to shift to "curate and update" instead of primary making new content. Therefore not only the search but also the edit & flag function should be put more in focus, not just in optimizing the workflow but also in the design philosophy (see alsoLarnus' answer,Journeyman Geeks' orcfrs' answer).

Journeyman Geek 218k52 gold badges408 silver badges899 bronze badges · Answer 10 · 2025-10-06 16:51:20Z

While I get the attempt to make comments a first class citizen - many of the current initiatives, removing visual barriers and making them the same size as regular posts does not really work well in practice for a regular user.

Ido think these are smaller, but consider how long comment threads are clutter, could we have a way to 'fold' them down if you're removing visual separators from them?

it also feels like share and rely, in the comments section, is more prominent than everything else on the page other than the ads.

Cave Johnson 6,3335 gold badges22 silver badges39 bronze badges · Answer 11 · 2025-10-06 18:58:09Z

16

I don't know how other people feel but I think we should try to keep user reputation and badge counts. If not on the question list page, then at least on the individual question pages. For one thing, I think having badges and reputation acts as a indicator of experience. The second reason is that the question page is one of the only places where reputation and badges are visible. If we are not showing them anymore, then what's the purpose of them?

I think there is enough room to show an abbreviated rep count (i.e. 1k) and badge counts inline between the display name and the relative post time.

Share

Improve this answer

answeredOct 6 at 18:58

Cave Johnson

6,3335 gold badges22 silver badges39 bronze badges

10

2
Thanks for raising this! We’re exploring an approach where reputation and badges appear on hover instead of inline. A few questions for you: In what situations do you reference those details on the question page? Would seeing them only on hover still support that use case?
EmmaBee
– EmmaBeeStaff
2025-10-06 19:16:17 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 19:16
5
@EmmaBee I think I reference those details when I am viewing an answer to a question that is also of interest to me. I want to know the experience level of the person contributing the answer. For your second question, I think I would still prefer to see the information without any interaction. As mentioned, I think it's important for people to "show off" their achievements from their participation. If it's not immediately visible I think it would turn off some people from participating.
Cave Johnson
– Cave Johnson
2025-10-06 19:47:45 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 19:47
2
Appreciate the follow up! Sounds like it’s most important for answers - and fair point about people wanting to show off 🙂. You might have seen in the mock-ups that we also removed rep and badges from the QUESTION author on the list page. Do you think that change matters as much, or mainly for answers?
EmmaBee
– EmmaBeeStaff
2025-10-06 19:57:33 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 19:57
4
@EmmaBee Well I think I would still prefer to show the information for question authors on theindividual question pages (for showing off as mentioned). But I think that information doesn't matter as much on the questionlist page. But it's still a nice-to-have.
Cave Johnson
– Cave Johnson
2025-10-06 20:29:37 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 20:29
9
@EmmaBee Hover isuseless for people using phones and other touchscreen devices.
PM 2Ring
– PM 2Ring
2025-10-07 13:44:51 +00:00
CommentedOct 7 at 13:44
1
@EmmaBee I disagree with Cave Johnson a bit and think rep should be on the questions list as well. I care less about the specific value and more about the user having any significant rep, as being new and/or not contributing any other positive things is one additional factor besides the question title/tags/snippet to identify problematic content (e.g. off-topic or LQ posts or spam). And please don't make it hover-only on the questions list as that basically makes it impossible to scan.
l4mpi
– l4mpi
2025-10-08 12:49:03 +00:00
CommentedOct 8 at 12:49
1
@EmmaBee it's extremely important to keep rep and badges shown both on questions and answers, it's my experience that an established user asking a Q is much more likely attract interest because you can count on the user to follow site etiquette, that goes from up-voting&accepting an answer - thus rewarding the answerer, to correctly asking an on-topic answerable question, to everything else that goes into creating a successful Q&A pair. If you're removing rep&badges from view in the listing you're taking away the main way individual accounts advertise themselves seeking help.
bad_coder
– bad_coder
2025-10-09 09:46:04 +00:00
CommentedOct 9 at 9:46
1
@EmmaBee every time you answer a question from a low-rep inexperienced user you've significantly increased the risk of not getting rewarded, not getting feedback, not receiving correct site etiquette in the interaction, and in both cases I'll carefully check the profile before wasting my time elaborating complicated answers to avoid the frustration that often follows. Hence, by removing rep&badges you've just hidden the main form of enticement and distinction. I might take time to check the question of an established expert even if I don't have time.
bad_coder
– bad_coder
2025-10-09 09:50:37 +00:00
CommentedOct 9 at 9:50
1
@bad_coder I can see where you’re coming from - rep can make it easier to spot people who understand how the site works. At the same time, one of Stack Overflow’s strengths has always been helping people learn how to contribute well, even if they’re newer. So we’re thinking carefully about how to support both experienced contributors and newcomers who are still building that track record. I'll share this feedback with the team!
EmmaBee
– EmmaBeeStaff
2025-10-09 17:57:24 +00:00
CommentedOct 9 at 17:57
1
@EmmaBee Hover would be worse. I don't need that information until I'm already thinking about the question/answer at least a little bit, so it can be at the end, it can be small, it can be abbreviated ... but if I have to aim and hover, I might as well just open their user page. (One additional use case is when I am researching something I don't understand, and the answer seems a bit off ... if the user has over 1000 reputation, it is probably me that missed something crucial and they might clarify if I ask carefully.)
Jim J. Jewett
– Jim J. Jewett
2025-10-12 06:07:34 +00:00
CommentedOct 12 at 6:07

Add a comment |

Otakuwu 3,9682 gold badges8 silver badges36 bronze badges · Answer 12 · 2025-10-06 17:54:34Z

There are some words there. Most of the highlighted ones, I can barely see - two are basically invisible. And the highlighting blends inway too much with the text.

Otakuwu 3,9682 gold badges8 silver badges36 bronze badges · Answer 13 · 2025-10-06 17:58:20Z

12

The code highlighting in dark mode doesn’t have nearly enough contrast, and is way too dark.

Share

Improve this answer

editedOct 6 at 17:58

answeredOct 6 at 17:13

Otakuwu

3,9682 gold badges8 silver badges36 bronze badges

1

9
Yeah, these aren't right. This falls under that "our mockups aren't perfect because we wanted you to see them early" disclaimer
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-06 18:17:42 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 18:17

Add a comment |

Otakuwu 3,9682 gold badges8 silver badges36 bronze badges · Answer 14 · 2025-10-06 17:56:25Z

11

Why are the voting buttons so...fat? The background doesn't need to be that big.

Share

Improve this answer

answeredOct 6 at 17:56

Otakuwu

3,9682 gold badges8 silver badges36 bronze badges

Add a comment |

VLAZ 23.1k3 gold badges51 silver badges125 bronze badges · Answer 15 · 2025-10-06 18:49:35Z

Making the custom filters not a vertical list any more, but a series of badges, is horrible as an overview.

The custom filters in the mockup are is not even sorted alphabetically. And even if they were, a vertical list is easier to skim for updates.

Adding a new custom filter will also not cause the "Jenga tower" of custom filters to reshuffle and then push things on new places. If a filter was on the third row at the end, it might now end up on the start of the fourth row.

mdfst13 9304 silver badges9 bronze badges · Answer 16 · 2025-10-11 03:03:15Z

This decision comes from our comments experiments where we saw a 30% increase in first time commenters.

Currently comments

are subject to deletion at any time for any reason or for no reason at all.
can't be edited after a certain time.
can't be edited by other regular users (unlike questions or answers).
are often cleared and put into chat for being off-topic.
are often deleted as unkind.

Note that for many of us, a 30% increase in first-time commenters sounds like a bad thing. Comments are like bad questions, something of which we want less, not more. We don't want you to encourage comments. We'd rather you discouraged them. They're second class citizens for exactly that reason.

On the one hand, we have community standards, which say that most comments should not exist. On the other hand, you're telling us that you are deliberately trying to increase them.

I seriously believe that you need to think about the kind of site you want. Then build that and call it anything but Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. See how it goes.

As it is, you seem to be saying that you hate everything about the current site except its past popularity. You seem to be hoping that it will recover its popularity if only you completely change it while keeping the existing community. However, you hate everything that the community wants.

If you have a brilliant idea for a new site, why not create it and gather a new community that matches it. Sell the existing site to someone who wants it to raise the funds.

I don't think that remaking the site as an inferior version of Reddit is going to work. Your community doesn't want that, so we'll naturally keep pushing the opposite direction. It would be much easier to create a new site that does what you want. Then you'd only need to convince people to use it.

It feels like they tried to do that with discussions. And then got surprised when that didn't work. But attributed it to not being the main site rather than intrinsic in the concept.
They seem to be trying to transfer the popularity of the current site to a new site. The problem being that they don't seem to have come up with a reason why people who like the current site would want to switch. It would be far easier to attract the kind of people that they want from scratch, as Reddit and Discord have, rather than to transform this site. Perhaps they're trying to copy Quora. However, Quora did not transfer its existing experts to their new site. Quora's community has mostly left and been replaced with AI.
I don't necessarily agree with you that the community has no reason to stay if they transform the whole site (at least if you broadly construe "community" to mean "whole userbase" rather than just us... enthusiasts, here on Meta), but I very muchdo agree that the company seems very intent on pushing on the accepted content boundaries and scope of the site without actually... talking about doing that. I feel pretty strongly that real transparency means having actual discussions about shifting site scopes and norms... but we've had almost none of those conversations. It bugs me a lot.
It's probably too optimistic, but I genuinely feel like things would be more amicable between Meta and the company if they just came out andsaid something like "hey, we feel like comments are important and facilitate healthy engagement on the site. We understand that's a departure from site norms, but we're moving in this direction"... because at least then there'sactual material to discuss. As-is, we're in this limbo of knowing but not really, left guessing at direction; and it's left a lot of room for accusations and beliefs of malice to creep in, which heavily degrades communication.

VLAZ 23.1k3 gold badges51 silver badges125 bronze badges · Answer 17 · 2025-10-06 18:57:23Z

Improved visibility: Applied filters are now more clearly displayed so you can easily see how the list of questions is being narrowed down.

I honestly cannot see how it is clearer. From the mockup, there are two dropdown menus instead of the single "Filter" menu. Currently, it can be hard to see if you have a filter applied. For example,when the filters are applied to unrelated searches that is unintuitive and unclear because the filter menu is hidden.

However, I cannot see how the new design improves on that. As long as the filter menu (either new or old) is collapsed, you cannot see what restrictions are on the question list. And the design makes it seem like the filter menu will not be open all the time. It looks like a dropdown menu that you open and dismiss as soon as you are finished with it.

If anything there should be an indicator that a filter is active - something that is not easy to miss. The mockup does not show anything like this, as far as I can see.

kaya3 6,6632 gold badges17 silver badges29 bronze badges · Answer 18 · 2025-10-10 18:21:55Z

We’ve heard that it can feel cluttered or hard to spot relevant content. We believe this update makes it faster to parse a list of questions and identify ones that are relevant to you.

As a long-time user, allow me to rank the elements of the question summary, from most important to least important (roughly):

Score
Whether there is an accepted answer
Title
Number of answers
Tags
Excerpt
Author's reputation
Modification time (especially unimportant on the recent question list, where we already know the question was modified recently, and on most sites is ordered by modification time)
Author's name
Number of views
Author's avatar

I'm sure other users will disagree about the relative order of a few of these, and it's hard to give a single ranking of importance when question summaries can appear in different contexts. (Remember when the "new questions" and "search" pageshad different views which were optimised for what you were looking at? That was nice. Alas.)

But what I must object to is that in the new design, the four least important elements are now thefirst things you see, and the two most important elements are now over on the right where they are easy to miss.

purely for (unsolicited) discussion- for me, the list'd start with title, then tags, then views/score, then answer count. i.e. what's the question, does it overlap with my domains of knowledge, roughly how many people seem to care about it, and how likely does it already have a good answer?

Twineee The Dark Wizard 1,0743 silver badges14 bronze badges · Answer 19 · 2025-10-13 20:26:19Z

Post Summary

The first thing I notice is the blocky design. The UI is also a lot larger, and takes up more room. I've also noticed a few special "tags":advice, andtooling. Stack Overflow is supposed to be a library of coding information, andnot a forum. Asking for advice or which tool to use is out of scope for Stack Overflow, and should be asked on Software Recommendations. Without the line breaks, the "faster scanning" does not work, as you have to process a dividing line between each question in your mind. If we are going to be in control of density, then please show us some of the less dense options.

Updated Filters

I don't know if this was just cropped out of the screenshot, but theNewest,Active, etc buttons seem to be missing. The new UI doesn't look to bad, and looks less confusing because of how you separated the filtering and sorting, but it also could be seen as more confusing due to the two filter buttons, and the stacked rectangles icon next to them. You could probably have one group of 3 buttons, the filter options button, the sort options button, and the go button.

The Questions List Page

There's a lot to go over here. I'm going left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

Top Bar

There is no use to have the AI Assistant linked in 2 places, and this is just a little confusing. TheCreate button looks quite forumish, and should be changed back toAsk Question.

Left Column

First of all, it's nice to see that you can collapse the side bar without going into settings. This is a lot easier to find and it could feel more familiar for new users if they can easily collapse it to see the main content better. I think the AI Assist logo is quite similar to the Super User logo.

The "Communities" section. As I said before, this is not a community site, it is a library of coding information. This looks very much like Reddit, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The UI is nice, but you don't want users thinking that this is a forum, not a formal Q & A.

The content section looks nice, all you changed was making it collapsible. The resources section is also nice, but I would move it above the "communities" section, as you will are more likely to be looking for one of these things than a different "community", but it is nice where it is.

Middle Section

I already went over most of this, but this shows better how it is stitched together.

Showing how many questions have been asked is really not necessary, and anyone who needs that can get it through the API. It does seem that there are only three buttons for the filtering, but this only brings more confusion to how to use it. This is also the first time we've seen an ad here, and I think it is very dirty and deceptive to have the Reddit-style ad hidden in there like a post. If there are ads, they should be obvious, and not in the way of anything.

Right Column

I think this looks nice, and this is a better spot to place an ad.

Redesigned Question Page

Having the question info at the top, by the title is somewhat nice, though not having an edit button, and not showing who edited it last and when could be slightly annoying. (btw, how come in the old version all the editors have This_is_not_a_forum's PFP??) On dark mode, the code block's highlighting scheme most definitely does not meet regulations for contrast.

Having the questions designed more minimally appears more like a forum, and less like a Q & A.

On the right side bar, the "Python Newbies" community looks quite like a collective, and I do not think we need 2 collective systems. If you are renaming all the sites to communities, then having 2 community definitions could definitely be very confusing,

The community activity sections looks out of place, and more like a marketing tool than something useful. Excluding chat from the side could be a mistake, as then people will only ever find the lobby, even if they are over 20 reputation.

With the related questions, you seem to be working backwards, since you now include the poster's name and profile picture.

Seethis for more about why Stack Overflow/Exchange should move away from forum-style features.

GlorfindelMod 269k62 gold badges675 silver badges1.4k bronze badges · Answer 20 · 2025-10-06 16:44:59Z

5

In the question list, some question are marked [tooling] or [advice]. Those look like special (meta-?)tags (though [tooling] already exists as a regular tag). Where do those come from? Are they automatically added by e.g. an AI module in the system, and if so, what are the criteria for this?

Share

Improve this answer

answeredOct 6 at 16:44

GlorfindelMod

269k62 gold badges675 silver badges1.4k bronze badges

4

1
Those are discussions. Why discussions have what appear to be accepted answers... i have no idea
Kevin B
– Kevin B
2025-10-06 16:49:39 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 16:49
2
My guess they are part of this experiment:Exploring new types of questions on Stack Overflow
Larnu
– Larnu
2025-10-06 18:55:30 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 18:55
1
@KevinB Insert "youll find some mistakes" disclaimer
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-06 19:07:48 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 19:07
1
That's right @Larnu
Piper
– PiperStaff
2025-10-06 19:08:26 +00:00
CommentedOct 6 at 19:08

Add a comment |

ash 2162 silver badges6 bronze badges · Answer 21 · 2025-10-06 19:19:34Z

I'm a big fan of the new longer post summaries, but can I convince you to make the light-theme body text a fraction darker? It feels pretty low-contrast and borderline hard to read, which ismaybe ok for the truncated summaries, but really not great for the actual question page.

(I realise that font rendering is fiddly, and I'm very willing to believe that part of the problem could be e.g. a rescaled screenshot.)

Jim J. Jewett 1313 bronze badges · Answer 22 · 2025-10-12 07:07:50Z

I hope (and mostly assume) that the New Post Summary is two alternatives pasted together, and that either you'll choose one or we can flip between them. That "repeating but in a different format" (without a clear break to say "this is an alternative") was pretty jarring.
I usually get annoyed at sites that shorten summaries too much, so that I have to click through to see even the full headline. But for this site, title only is probably sufficientif you don't trim that title to fit in whatever size visual box you were hoping for.
Most sites doing visual design (as opposed to just semantic markup and letting the browser defaults apply) worry way too much about getting the box sizes pixel-perfect, and not enough about readability. If I have to increase the font size (and I often do), I would much rather have a box that is "too big" than have the content clipped and unreadable, or (slightly less bad) unreadable without a horizontal scroll and scroll back for every single line.
This is even more important on phone screens, where scrolling or zooming only a portion of the page (usually either fonts in general, or code examples specifically) is often worse than with a keyboard and touchpad.
This might be a quirk of your screenshots, but it looks like you actually shrunk the fonts, rather than making them larger. (Maybe it is just unbolding?) I prefer the New Posts summary with just the titles (though it probably depends on community and even individual poster), but the first alternative was clearlyworse than the current format, at least in that picture, when viewed on my screen.
The "you said you made fonts bigger, but they look smaller" problem also happened on the filters and sorting, but there itmight turn out to be OK, since that is mostly text that won't change very often. If it is a popout or separate window of some sort, though, no need to keep it small.
I can't actually read the (screenshots of) the Question List or New Question pages. But that is also true of the "current" format, and I can read the current site, so that isprobably a screenshot issue.
It would probably be helpful to show the same content in the new and old formats. Though if you do that, be extra wary of getting to the point where you only look at the visuals and don't bother trying to read them. A visual map with tiny or blurred words is sufficient for navigation when you are familiar with the page (as you will become for any particular test page), butnot sufficient for users trying to read a particular post for the first time.
A wider default is probably good, but please ensure the page still works on a phone or in a tall, narrow window off to the side of whatever someone might have been doing as their main task on a larger screen.

peterh 6,3982 gold badges19 silver badges47 bronze badges · Answer 23 · 2025-10-17 00:16:25Z

2

Share

Improve this answer

answeredOct 17 at 0:16

peterh

6,3982 gold badges19 silver badges47 bronze badges

Add a comment |

Michael come lately 7048 silver badges14 bronze badges · Answer 24 · 2025-10-10 00:51:02Z

Are the sort options currently saved as part of a "saved" or "custom" filter? How is that preserved/changing/etc. now that the sorting is done in a separate dropdown menu?

Disclaimer: I personally do not use that feature here, but if I were a committed answerer or bounty hunter, I imagine I'd want to keep the sort with the special filtering.

Movatterモバイル変換

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Overflow Redesign: Questions

Updated Post Summary

Updated Filters

Bringing it all together: The Question List page

Redesigned Question Page

Join the Conversation

24 Answers24

Edit

Flag

Post Summary

Updated Filters

The Questions List Page

Top Bar

Left Column

Middle Section

Right Column

Redesigned Question Page

You mustlog in to answer this question.

Linked

Related

Hot Network Questions

Subscribe to RSS