What happened to the Answers design?

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

Hey all, Dennis here! If you don't know me, I'm the maintainer of Atlassian Answers and took over from Jeremy Largman some time ago. As you may noticed, we changed the design! It's much more in sync with the style of Atlassian's products. We also added a whole bunch of new features such as automated swag, mobile site, badges, etc, so be sure to see the what's new page and the blog.

Oh yeah, get your free tshirt/backpack/jacket here (be sure to log in)

More awesomeness coming your way soon!

Edit: the What's New page 404's after a few hours, this bug has been raised. Please see the blog post for all the features.

Edit2: the What's New page has been fixed.

[Ryan Goodwin · Accepted solution]

Big fan of your work Dennis

[Septa Cahyadiputra]

Great Job Dennis, I'm gonna missed not getting the old t-shirt design but the $1500 USD t-shirt is good enough :).

Anyway, I believe your whats new page is inproperly link as this link:

https://answers.atlassian.com/whatsnew/

Leads to 404. I believe a lot of people would really love to scheme trough the new features of our beloved Answers.

Cheers,
Septa Cahyadiputra

[C_ Faysal]

I was waiting the whole day. Finally its here. Love it. Thx atlassians

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

Please try to follow the StackExchange models as much as possible, removing the quesiton voting options was not a good option, there are good questions and bad ones. In this case the problem was the missing incentive for voting these questionss. SE model is very well designed and tuned, don't try to reinvent the wheel.

Instead just find incentives for people to use this site, so far I was pleased about the answers from atlassian partenrs but getting answers from atlassian employees was not as common as I would expect.

Considering that answers.atlassian.com is a way to ease the work of the support team, please ask support team to answer questions on the site. Find a way to motivate them to anwer this questions.

Personally I would like to be able to disable the badge notifications, as I am not interested about these, I just want to find the answers to my questions and share my knowledge when it makes sense.

[ConradR]

+1 for question voting

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

Duly noted, we noticed a bunch of you are missing it. We're going to bring this back in the next release: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-1000

[Mizan]

Great work :) profile images are clearly visible :D

[RianA]

Great job Dennis! KL peeps will definitely love on how they can redeem their t-shirt easily now :D

[Harry Chan]

The jacket looks cool. Still a lot of points to go. Hopefully with this auto system we can finally get some swag. The manual system never worked.

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

I humbly apologize for the mess, the reason why was because it was a cumbersome manual process and the demand grew so large that we became completely overwhelmed by it. Hopefully with automating the process it will now be a lot better, let me know if you're running into problems getting your new tshirt/backpack :)

[Harry Chan]

Thanks Dennis. Working towards the jacket! I like that the most compared to the other swag.

[ConradR]

Good job!

[Jon Verville]

What's new page is still broken as of 2:36PM EST https://answers.atlassian.com/whatsnew/

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

For some reason it keeps 404'ing every hour, ticket logged: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-970

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

This has now been fixed, check it out: https://answers.atlassian.com/whatsnew/

[Septa Cahyadiputra]

Hi Guys,

I must say, this are all an incredible feedback, in just one day!. Anyway, all valid points here and please feel free to logged a bug report here if you feel this should be considered as a bug.

From here, I can only "Like" your comment or up vote your answers to show support of your feedbacks, however from our bug reporting system we can do a lot more :). Again, thank you so much for all the feedback. Looking forward to the much improved new Answers because of your AWESOME feedbacks.

Cheers,
Septa Cahyadiputra

[Ramiro Pointis]

Two bug reports added:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-996

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-997

[Septa Cahyadiputra]

Awesome....!!!

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

These bugs have now been fixed!

[Mirek]

@Dennis: I like the step to change the design.. The old one was no to smooth and.. old :) .. However there is a lot of work to do.. I already noticed few bugs by just looking around .. 404 page to whats new content is of course one of them :) .. Hmm.. Did someone fully tested the system before releasing it?

Overall idea is very good.. I like it! However I hope that we will not need to wait to long to fix the most annoying bugs. :)

Keep up the good work!

BTW..

I think that "vote question" option should be added back again.. Or at least try to figure out how to show most popular questions not only based on a number of views.. Maybe multiplying numbers of followers with number of comments and likes? This could give some kind of ratio more valuable than only number of views..

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

@Dennis: I like the step to change the design.. The old one was no to smooth and.. old :) .. However there is a lot of work to do.. I already noticed few bugs by just looking around .. 404 page to whats new content is of course one of them :) .. Hmm.. Did someone fully tested the system before releasing it?

We did, but there was some weird OSQA bug that would trigger pages to 404 after a certain time period with an x amount of views. This has now been fixed

Overall idea is very good.. I like it! However I hope that we will not need to wait to long to fix the most annoying bugs :)

We released a bugfix release today, let me know if there are still annoying bugs left.

I think that "vote question" option should be added back again.. Or at least try to figure out how to show most popular questions not only based on a number of views.. Maybe multiplying numbers of followers with number of comments and likes? This could give some kind of ratio more valuable than only number of views..

We're going to bring this back in the next release: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-1000

[Naren]

Nice work Dennis!! The UI is very pleasent. It will take some time to get used to it though. ;)

Liked the 'Like / Unlike' functionality very much.

As @Jobin rightly said, you missed lots of karma for this announcement by hiding this functionality!. But yes, voting up questions functionality will surely be missed :).

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

I can add: questions in the main page - no user (some users have really interesting questions, but I don't want to follow them, as they have a lot of activity here). Again, little stuff like this ...

We'll be bringing this back in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-1036

Also, we're going to bring this back in the next release: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/ANSWERS-1000

Please let me know if there are any other things from the old design that you'd like to get back :)

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

I agree that we made some of the paths longer by nesting them in a menu, but I hope this will improve the quality of the site. Also, instead of clicking on Browse -> Questions you can also click on the Answers logo that will take you to the same question list :)

I'll see if I can add the user back in an elegant manner as well.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Yeah, Ramiro, I will get used to that as well ... :)

I can add: questions in the main page - no user (some users have really interesting questions, but I don't want to follow them, as they have a lot of activity here). Again, little stuff like this ...

[Ramiro Pointis]

Just my opinion: In my case I prefer this way because in the same button I have all the options I usually use, Questions, Badges, Users. More comfortable in same spot.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Ok, you will hate me for this but: this design looks nice, but I believe it misses a lot of functionality stuff. One example: before, I only had to do one click to see the questions, now I have to clink on "Browse", then Questions. Stuff like this ..

[Bruna Griebeler]

It's beautiful!! Love it!

[RambanamP]

UI looks awesome!!!!

[Natalie Hobson]

I love the badges too...I think you should have physical versions of them, and once you earn them in the forum you could buy them from the store. I wear a lot of "flair" on my lanyard at work and would love to have some Atlassian pins on it! :D

[nriley]

What's New 404-ing is fixed now.

[Hanae alahcen]

i love the badges system ..

[KieranA]

As Jamie said, "what's new" takes you to a 404.

[Ramiro Pointis]

@Dennis: Awesome work! The new UI it's so smooth, you hit right in the bullseye!

As @Jobin and @Nahn said I think the vote question it's a good idea to have.. I would really miss that...

[Ramiro Pointis]

Other thing, it looks like the delete answer it's not working... I'm trying to delete this because it's duplicated.

[Ramiro Pointis]

@Dennis: Awesome work! The new UI it's so smooth, you hit right in the bullseye!

As @Jobin and @Nahn said I think the vote question it's a good idea to have.. I would really miss that...

[Ramiro Pointis]

Another thing... I think it's a good idea to show how many votes has a comment have.

[Ramiro Pointis]

sorry *can't edit*

[Ramiro Pointis]

Other thing... You can edit the comments anymore hahaha

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

lol, duly noted :)

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

You should be able to edit now! :)

[OmairM]

@Dennis: is the source of Atlassian Answers available for download?

[toddparson]

I'm interested in this as well. I believe Atlassian uses OSQA and was curious if Atlassian is still using OSQA for the underlying functionality or if Atlassian is rolling it's own Q&A solution now.

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

We're still using OSQA as a base, but we forked it over 2 years ago, the sourcecode doesn't look much like it anymore :) Anyway, there are some preliminary talks to roll Q&A into Atlassian's product portfolio -- to be continued