One of the first Stack Exchange sites I found out about was User Experience. My interest in this topic was sparked long before, while I was in college. I found human-computer-interaction one of the more fascinating aspects of the particular “brand” of AI program that was taught at Utrecht University. So today it’s finally time to do a new episode of the Stack Exchange Challenge, on UX Stack Exchange.
Current Statistics
Let’s first roll up the stats for this particular sub-domain:
| Fact | UX.SE |
|---|---|
| Questions | 5,278 |
| Questions with no upvoted answers | 42 (0.80%) |
| FAQ (questions with most links) | 1,441 |
| Top 3 questions | 200 votes, 128 votes, 118 votes |
| Questions active last hour | 2 |
| All-time rep for top 3 users | 26.7k, 18.8k, 15.4k |
| Meta questions | 345 |
My Questions
This is where I struggled, the same way I had problems in the Programmers episode: it’s really hard to ask a question on this topic that’s not subjective. Here are the only two questions I mustered:
- How do you create or select an icon for a feature? This question has in fact done very well. One of the prominent site members even promoted it to an official FAQ question!
- Standards for and measuring contrast of solid color fills: this was sparked by my Meta Stack Overflow question on contrast.
Even though I found it hard to formulate Stack Exchange worthy questions, I’m still pretty content with these two questions.
My Answers
It wasn’t until writing this post that I saw I already had written ten answers, and counting! Most of them don’t have more than one or two upvotes, except this one:
- Is there ever a requirement to allow text to be underlined when it’s not a link or a header? The 8 upvotes are probably collateral from the question being very popular. Either way, this answer did score me some rep, both through votes as well as through the bounty.
Honorable mention goes to my answer about the “Official JavaScript icon”. I gave that answer to prep myself for this blog post, but the question was closed as “off topic” before I even finished writing this post.
Interesting Questions
Here are a few entertaining questions from User Experience:
- Is this rotating cube interface user-friendly? A troll question about a funny css demo. I wonder if the moderators will ever have enough guts to close it as “not a real question”.
- Why do most public toilet doors open inwards? Not something you’d expect to find on that site, because it’s not about software. Fun question nonetheless.
Community Wiki
The top question in this category is probably what you’d expect:
Conclusion
This site’s topic is great! Some of the questions are great! There are some really fundamental questions on there.
This site’s not very active. Only some of the questions are great. There are a lot of very “localized” quesions on there.
I’ll probably just keep lurking, hopping by every once in a while.
One thought to “Episode 5: User Experience Stack Exchange Challenge”
Comments are closed.