UX – Meta For You

I’ve finished my self-imposed Stack Exchange challenge. What a great feeling: finishing things. Only one thing left on my to do list: create a small epilogue. And this is it.

The epilogue is going to be short, using the same format as the half-time post: a wrap up with links to all the bits of this series.

Stack Exchange Challenge (March 13th, 2012)

Episode 1: Cooking Stack Exchange Challenge (March 20th, 2012)
Episode 2: Programming Stack Exchange Challenge (April 2nd, 2012)
Episode 3: Gaming Stack Exchange Challenge (May 14th, 2012)
Episode 4: Android Stack Exchange Challenge (June 20th, 2012)
Episode 5: User Experience Stack Exchange Challenge (September 9th, 2012)
Episode 6: DBA Stack Exchange Challenge (October 8th, 2012)

Stack Exchange Challenge: Half-time (February 24th, 2013)

Episode 7: Area 51 Stack Exchange Challenge (May 13th, 2013)
Episode 8: Area 51 Discuss Stack Exchange Challenge (June 30th, 2013)
Episode 9: Meta Stack Overflow Stack Exchange Challenge (August 12th, 2013)
Episode 10: Stack Overflow Stack Exchange Challenge (September 11th, 2013)

Stack Exchange Challenge: Full-time (September 21st, 2013)

And that’s all I have to say about that. Time for a new challenge?

User Experience Stack Exchange

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:

Must-read User Interface Book?

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.