me not like new lay out of this section! (not a question)

i dislike the new lay out of this section, because now only 2 or 3 questions fit on my screen, ie. any overview is lacking and i have to scroll for ages to see all questions. booooooh

[Walter Roberson]

For clarity, which section are you referring to?

[Sargondjani]

the 'Answers' section

[TAB]

Walter, I have also raised similar issue in your wish-list.

For example http://www.mathworks.in/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/2299743-tab/answers

The oldest answered thread is on the top. It takes long time to go through the all answers and reach the latest one.

[Sargondjani]

yes TAB good point as well...

...but seriously, this new lay out drives me crazy!! haha

[Randy Souza]

The sort order should be fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.

Answer 1

[Jan]

Wow! I've opened Answers since the layout update the first time now. And saying "I don't like it" does not match my impression. I'm startled by the large number of boxes and the big distance between the question and the answer fields. It is impossible now to answer even a one-liner question without scrolling, when three small comments to the question fill the screen vertically already (as in this thread currently). I admit that I have asked personally to add more impressive suggestions to formulate good questions and good answers. But e.g. this section:

 Answer this question

 This place is reserved for an answer to the question.

 *  To clarify the question, edit it.
 *  To thank answerers, add your vote to helpful answers and accept the best one.
 *  To ask for clarification, submit a comment to the question or answer.

occupies too much vertical space in addition. In opposite to this there are big fat unused empty areas on the left and right of this window. I've bought a new computer already to reduce the keyboard latency, but I will not install a 2nd monitor on top of the other one to be able to see all I need without scrolling.

In opposite to the header above the field for answering, the page for creating a question contains too few explanations. Beginners in this forum have to puzzle, what meaningful "Tags" are and what thea are useful for at all. The same for "Products". A link to "how to ask a good question" would reduce the noise in the forum substantially here. But after the question has been submitted, I see the tip:

 You are more likely to receive responses to well-written questions and comments

Note: The most noise in this forum is found in the questions of beginners, while the answers are to 99% lean and clean. Therefore we need more help on the page to create questions and less help when creating answers to reduce the waste of space.

[EDITED after reading http://blogs.mathworks.com/community/2012/06/27/new-features-in-matlab-answers/] You see more tips about good questions, when you ask the first time. In the page for asking a new question these tips do not bother, so I'd suggest to keep them there longer or forever.

These are hard drawbacks in the usability of this forum. Mostly the need to scroll while answering reduces my motivation to answer frequently. I seems like the designers lost the idea of the goal of a forum: Let volunteers answer questions as easy as possible. In opposite to this, "insert white space to let it look fancy" has only secondary importance.

The button for code formatting still contains "{}" without any relation to Matlab. The braces would be fine for C-code... The tooltip is funny tautology also: Hold the mouce over the "{} Code" field to see "Code" inside a box. I suggest "Format marked section as code".

I do love the "Disabl" button. It's power saves so much time and eases my mind. Thanks! I hope Walter's time is not wasted by waiting anymore. And I think that the typo is charming.

I will have to dig in the documentation to find out, what the Flag, Close and Link buttons will do - perhaps they are features for editors only? I know, that I always suggest to read the documentation. But I admit, that I appreciate intuitive GUIs also.

Changing the order in the list of Answers back to chronologically (as it was in spring 2011) is a bad idea: It needs ages to find my last 10 answers.

Does it solve any problems, that the subjects require at least 4 words now? I had not problems with "fscanf warning message", "fsovle error 241", "RGB or HSV" or "Legend Problem", while "SYNTAX MATLAB" and "Cell" has been meaningless. But "I HAVE MATLAB SYNTAX PROBLEM" won't be better.

Summary: I'm frightend. A certain number of the bunch of very good suggestions of the wish-list has been implemented after 15 months, but some further changes in the layout reduce the usability again. A very slow step partially in the wrong direction. With this speed of improvements, it will take years until Matlab Answers has the level of usability I know from other internet forums.

[TAB]

Also there No use of adding Image button. At least I was expecting a mechanism to browse and upload images directly on the page.

It still required to upload the image on third party image hosting sites, and after some days it results in below situation.

See below this post.

[Jan]

TAB, I've waited for this to happen. Now this thread has become meaningless and should be deleted. Forcing the users to host the pictures on a foreign server is contra-productive.

[Ryan]

The "link" feature is to provide a "direct link" to the answer (I obtained this information by hovering). That's probably the best feature added because it will provide a faster method to direct users to appropriate prior posts on Answers. This and the ability to add code to comments is nice. I have no problem with the image button still requiring outside uploading sites, although I find it hard to believe that Mathworks couldn't spare some server space and implement their own upload service.

I agree with you about the liberal use of white space. Does it look better aesthetically? Probably. Is it more useful? No. I am sure we will all get used to it over time, but when dealing with a Q/A type forum I think it's best to fit as much information into a space as possible. While this format may be better for people asking questions once or occasionally, for those that answer often I see the extra space just getting in the way.

Of course, everyone could just upgrade their monitors. If they optimized for retina display I bet they could fit a question and an entire answer on the screen without scrolling.

[Jan]

@Ryan: You are right, I like the links also - very helpful! When I disable JavaScript in the browser, the links are shows as clear text and fill about 10% of my screen :-) But with the "Disabl" button there is no need to disable JavaScript anymore.

[Walter Roberson]

The links are great!

Have you happened to look at the full activities list? http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/activities/ . Each of the entries there links to the precise location affected, which is a very nice use of links. (It certainly could have been done before without the links button being present, but is one of the first acknowledgements that individual links are real and permanent and it is fair game to use them.)

[Jan]

I calmed down over night. New summary:

• Very good: Links, editing and formatting in comments, additional hints for beginners, preview can be disabled (it would be nice, if a click on this button concerns all subsequently opened threads, so the value coulöd be store in a cookie?), the chronological-ordering bug has been fixed after some hours already (Thanks Randy!).
• Good: more editor power for more users, flags and close button.
• Bad: JavaScript problems on large pages, the latency problems are not fixed, but actually they have grown! The ability to disable the preview masks this problem only.
• Very bad: Even more space is wasted in the layout, still no useful navigation in the list of answers and questions of a specific contributor. It seems like fancy optics and the reputation points / editor powers are more important than the core function of this forum: ship information from answerers to askers. The search field is still not intuitive and it is not trivial to find the corresponding instructions.

[Kent Millard]

This is very helpful, thanks for the feedback Jan. Quick question: Can you describe what type of navigation would be useful within the list of answers and questions? Also if you can point me in the direction of any example, that would be great.

Feel free to e-mail me. Thanks.

[Randy Souza]

Lucas, when you say answers tab are you referring to the tab on your profile page?

[Walter Roberson]

Most of the time, it doesn't load at all for me, and I have to cancel the page load and retry.

When I say "it doesn't load at all for me", I mean that part of the page gets loaded (sometimes just enough to change the name of the browser "tab", sometimes not even that much), and then it waits indefinitely trying to load the page if I am using Firefox (indefinitely: exceeded 12 hours in one case yesterday.) Safari is often a bit more successful, but Safari usually ends up giving a message about the page load having timed out.

15 seconds is quite fast compared to having to try for tens of minutes to simply get the index page to load :(

Answer 2

[Ryan]

What is the value of having a "Home" and "Search" link on the navigation panel (upper left hand side) if both link to the same page? Redundancy is redundant.

[Jan]

And most of all it is redundant.

[Randy Souza]

Don't forget--they're redundant.

But, seriously, there is a reason that we added the search link. Most visitors who come to Answers arrive via Google at a specific question, not via the Answers home page. If the question that they arrive at does not solve their problem, we want to encourage them to search for other questions rather than ask a new question, which is likely to be a duplicate. The link in the navigation is a quick-and-easy attempt to steer people toward search.

We plan to integrate search into the ask-a-question workflow as a better way to re-route duplicate questions. At that point it's likely that we'll remove the search link from the main navigation bar.

[Jan]

@Randy: A dedicated search page would be useful, which contains the small "Search MATLAB Answers" input field and the instructions we find at http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/about/answers/#search under the header "Using Search Directives". Then a searcher does not have to open one page for the instructions and the other for typing the request.

The naked input field on top of the list of questions is too lean to be intuitive. Last week I've tried to search for meta-questions and typed: "tags: meta" in the search field. I still think this is intuitive, because the corresponding element in the question is called "Tags:" also. But the found items differed from my expectations, I started to try to remember, where to find the search instructions, and finally I found out, that I need "tag: meta" in singular form.

I have a decent level of experiences in this forum, but I admit, that I'm still overchallenged by the details of the search process. Therefore I ask you not to remove the search button, but to let it point to a search page, which contains all information required for searching. This would be a "quick-and-easy attempt to steer people toward search".

[Ryan]

Something along the lines of what Jan said is what I was expecting when I clicked on the new search link or a variation of an "advanced search" with fields or drop down menus with the different search options that are explained in the link Jan also provided.

Sure most users arrive from Google, but I would assume that most try some sort of basic search again once arriving to Answers before asking a question. The search link should provide an option to help the user search more effectively.