Hey everyone,
I wanted to create this thread for the community to come together and brainstorm on some Stacker News UX feedback, ideas, feature requests, and potential improvements.
@k00b has been shipping new features super fast, and all of them have been built in public with significant community feedback involved. I figured this could be a thread to generate even more ideas for improving the platform.
Below I've added 3 UX ideas I think would improve the site, would love to hear any thoughts on them and other ideas.
- Removing the ~ Symbol Next to Jobs
The ~ symbol in the main menu bar on the desktop site looks like an error or a typo.
I understand the Stacker News ethos of building quirky features to help users understand this is a different kind of forum, but I feel like quirky features should be built with intent. At a certain point, too many quirky features start becoming confusing for new users.
For example, I’m in favor of the using lightning bolts to denote upvotes, the yellow flash that appears on the screen when users upvote, and the lightning font of Stacker News’ logo, because all those quirks are directly connected to the main value proposition of the platform.
But the ~ doesn’t have any connections to the idea of value transfer or to the lightning network. It's just a random symbol, and it isn't used in any other part of the site.
I worry it will confuse new users. At first glance, it looks like someone made a typo on the menu and forgot to fix it.
In addition, ~ is not a key that people use often, and in math settings it’s used as a synonym for approximately… which makes it all the more confusing to see a menu item titled ‘approximately jobs’.
Finally, and this is just my personal opinion… to me the ~ looks a lot like the tail of a sperm cell.
Now I can’t unsee it.
My suggestion is just to remove the symbol entirely, and just call each new sub by its name. In this case, the menu item would just say 'jobs', and the URL format could be stacker.news/s/jobs.
- Job Posting Fields for Company, Salary, and Location
Job postings should have dedicated fields for company name, salary, and location with a toggle button for remote ok.
Without these fields, companies will post jobs in different formats, and some will undoubtedly forget to include their company name, location, salary, etc.
Some will even post the same info in different orders, making it a nightmare for users trying to navigate the page.
Luckily, Stacker News already has a solution available.
Stacker News uses / to denote different attributes for posts on the main page, and that same format could be applied to the job postings when they are shown to users.
For example, my suggestion is that Stacker News formats job postings to appear as:
Stacker News / Senior Full Stack Developer / Austin or Remote / $100K
The / symbol is a simple way to break up different job attributes that is already used heavily on the site.
- Default New Users Boosts to 10 sats
When new users sign up, their default boost amount is set to 1 sat. This extremely low default setting introduces anchoring bias if/when users go to change their default boost amounts.
If a user wants to increase their default boost setting from 1 sat, they probably won't raise it to 50 sats. That’s a 50x jump, which sounds like too much of a jump when expressed like that.
Instead, the user will likely opt for a more "reasonable" raise to 5 or 10 sats instead.
My suggestion is to set the default boost amount to 10 sats for a cohort of new users and see if it has any impact on their tendencies to boost posts over time, and whether it raises the average amount those users pay in their boosts.
My bet is that it will, and will lead to more people earning more sats for their posts without forcing any new changes on users.
It’s still only one click to change the boost amount back to 1 sat if users don’t want to pay 10 sats, and realistically, 10 sats is still only half of a penny. Seems like it's worth a try.
Thoughts?