Does Graphic Design have a low voting problem?

Question

I work at Stack Exchange in the community development department, and I would like to both introduce myself to the Graphic Design community (hello!) and inform you that we think Graphic Design is one of the sites that has shown a lot of potential for growth (Stats and GIS being two others, in case you frequent there as well). We want to focus some of our energy on the site, starting now.

The first thing I want to bring to the community's attention is the possible voting problem Graphic Design has. Many questions on the front page have a score of 2 or lower, which gives the impression that every question is as good as every other question (and that most every question isn't that good to begin with). Do you think the content on Graphic Design is deserving of more votes?

If you want to see what kinds of questions are getting the most eyeballs and interaction on the site, here is a list of 63 questions that meet one of these 2 criteria:

• questions with the most views and a score under 2
• questions with over 3 answers and a score under 2

Of course views should never equate to votes, and the most popular questions in search engines are those that deal with everyday problems that every Graphic Designer (from novice to expert) encounters. That being said, are these questions a good representation of the site? Does it help or hurt the site to have our most viewed and answered questions be ones with low scores? Do they deserve those low scores? These aren't rhetorical questions at all, and I want to hear what the community thinks. Your assessment trumps mine; you've all been with this site for a long time!

If you have time, please check out those questions. It is entirely possible that you've already voted on every single one of them; only you know how much or little you vote. Vote on them based on their quality, vote on the answers based on their quality, edit the titles or body if they need it, vote to close questions if need be or share questions you think are interesting. Again, most of these questions may be general, non-expert knowledge. But they are the ones people see the most, so cleaning them up and making them as awesome as possible could be great promotion for the site.

And in general, I think it could help the community to keep an eye on voting as new questions come in. Community members who are regulars on other Stack sites, do you notice a lesser degree of participation here? Do the quality questions get the proportionate amount of votes? If you think they do, are you fine with the overall low scores of the site? Am I completely wrong in my assessment that this is a low-voting site? Definitely let me know!

This is the first of a lot of exciting things we'll be doing with Graphic Design, so if you have any ideas about what we could do to help the community, please start discussing it on Meta and chat! I read Graphic Design's Meta regularly and will be hanging out in the chat room, so please ping me if you have any big ideas. Let's see if we can make them happen!

If there are bigger issues with the site, please make a Meta post about your concerns!

I apologize for this being so long!

Answer 1

The other answers here are already very good. I don't think this site has a voting problem so much as it has a boring-question problem. Our questions-per-day average is pretty low, and, as others have noted, a lot of the questions are "drive-by" Font Identification or Beginner Photoshop questions. Voting, editing, other-community-actions won't turn boring questions into interesting ones.

When we do have new questions or answers that are actually interesting, they get voted up. We have a handful new(ish) users who have gained a fair amount of rep in just a few months. Getting people to vote on good content isn't the problem.

I don't have an answer for what's wrong with this site, but it doesn't feel like a vibrant designer-oriented community. Several of the top meta questions deal with this directly by addressing site scope, how to reach out to designers (not SO users), etc.

Your two meta posts are addressing symptoms without identifying a root problem. Encouraging more voting won't make existing questions more interesting. No amount of editing can make certain questions more interesting. Driving the answered-question rate higher (already at ~96%) won't bring better questions.

Answer 2

I am very new here, but maybe my feeback as someone new gives you another view on the topic.

After reading this, I did realize that I rarely vote on questions. But mostly on answers. I guess it is true that my focus in not on voting as much as it is on interesting questions. And maybe that is the one issue I have here personally. I see a lot of questions that aren't exactly new or challenging. Asking for fonts seems to be be a regular thing. Many basic questions about how to use certain design programs. And of course, brainstorming. At least this is my very personal impression.

Where am I going with this? I think most peoples motivation is to solve interesting questions. It is very rewarding. And I think low scores maybe represent low complexity.

I am of course taking away from this to be more aware of highlighting good questions.

Answer 3

I got your email and have been voting what I feel is appropriately. I don't want to up or down vote a question just for the sake of voting.

I think, right now, the issue may be drive by users who either don't know they can, or don't care to vote. If you look at the users asking questions, many never return to the question. And if they do return, that's about it. I don't see many new users jumping in to other questions to provide answers (and votes).

So there's not a great deal of return traffic to boost voting. From what I perceive, it's a group of core users (8-12) that vote. So question scores in the 2-10 range would seem on par with that.

Rest assured I do vote though. :)

Answer 4

What follows evolved as I was writing it, pulling together my own thoughts and revisiting the whole issue.

In my case, I've a broad range of expertise in design and layout, branding, large format, etc.. I consider InDesign and design workflows for print, web or motion graphics my primary areas of expertise, but most of my answers (by far) concern Photoshop. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why. For every InDesign or Illustrator user out there, there are at least a thousand who use Photoshop, just as for every designer there are a bazillion photographers. In the same way, there are thousands of beginners and dabblers for every skilled designer, tens of thousands for every one who is highly skilled. Out of that small pool of highly skilled people, a very few have found GD.SE and have elected to contribute here by answering questions. Once in a while, one of us will ask a question now and again, but for the most part we wear the advisor hat.

We need to figure out how to attract the missing majority: intermediate-level professional designers who have production questions (Ryan's example of label design for a curved surface is a perfect example), style questions, typography questions and all the practical issues one runs into in the day-to-day throes of design work.

My own feeling is we are both helped and hindered by the format of SE itself. Many design-related issues lend themselves to discussion, which we discourage; up-and-coming designers want feedback and need interactive feedback if they are to become more skilled. Lack of a PM facility relegates interaction to chat, which has scheduling issues, or to limited comment threads. In some cases it pushes the comm out to regular email, of which I've had my share. The SE system also isn't the easiest for putting up visuals, especially for newcomers, yet design is purely visual.

I've looked at this from a number of different angles, including viewing it purely as a marketing problem. So far, I don't have a workable answer. I'm not even certain that volume is the most important thing we should be looking for, nor votes.

We are at once too generalized and too specialized. Too generalized in that we have no particular focus that would attract a core group of enthusiastic learners/sharers ("graphic design" is a very broad field); too specialized in that we keep trying to push the quality of questions to a higher level while we don't attract the users who would generate them.

Compounding the problem is that the very broad sweep of design topics that we cover in a single forum can make finding information quite challenging. I just did a search for a specific answer I knew was on the site (because I wrote it). Took me several pages of search results to dig it up. Another search, for "layer blend modes," yields 23 pages of results, most of which don't pertain to layer blend modes.

Sites that attract professional designers tend to be more focused (deke.com, rwillustrator.blogspot.com, indesignsecrets.com, creativecow.net, lynda.com), or more interactive (there are some useful, well-populated and long-running design forums out there) or both.

The best design forum/Q&A sites are segmented by topic. "Graphic Design" splits into anywhere from 4 or 5 to more than a dozen subjects, depending on which of the more useful sites you look at.

These kinds of sites are attractive for three reasons: content is easy to find by topic; useful content is pushed onto these sites, rather than waiting for someone to ask just the right question; and back-and-forth discussion is not limited to minimal comment threads or hard-to-schedule live chats. They are also attractive to experienced designers, for the same reasons.

Quite how we compete with them I still don't know, but we won't be the go-to site for the missing majority until we figure that out. Our positioning has to be something on the order of "the place to find great answers to difficult design questions" or something along those lines, with a solid reason why it's better to ask here than go looking somewhere else even if you've never used another SE site.

Answer 5

Yup. I am resurrecting this post, and probably some others related.

After reading this thread and several related this comes to my mind.

• A Graphic Design forum should be more visual.

• Graphic Design is a hell lot more "Opinion Based" than other categories, and the intrinsic rules of the site almost forbid this.

Alan Gilbertson commented about the feedback. And in this case, feedback is not a matter of "right or wrong".

Probably Design has more proud involved than other sites. Probably one motivation of designers is to show the work, rather than to be told this is a right answer.

This thread is 4 years old. I am wondering how much this has evolved.

Answer 6

This was originally a comment to agree/add to @Farray's answer, but it got too long.

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I feel like I have to mention this somewhere as it has been bugging me for a long time.

Every once in a while the "Community" bumps up OLD questions that don't have accepted answers. As an idea it's fairly good cause normally you might not find these questions ( ...and you might be interested in those to help out the community ), but these questions seem to pretty much always be:

1. Questions that are really old.
2. Questions where OP showed no interest to get the question answered (i.e. giving more information if it looks like no one is getting what is being asked).
3. Questions where OP last logged in long time ago and the question is just hanging in there.
4. Questions where OP for some reason doesn't want to accept or doesn't really understand the concept.
5. Questions that are just outside of our knowledge ( not a bad thing ).
6. and sometimes some of these list items combined.

I don't think I've ever seen community bumped questions getting accepted in here. They just slowly fall down in the page as other questions are updated or added. Maybe these bumps could be kept out of the main page.

Not to mention, sometimes few brave men and women (mainly new users) try to answer these questions, and they may get a few votes for their answer, but doesn't really make the question any more attractive as it, according to my knowledge, won't get accepted ( even if it is the perfect answer ). I think I've seen quite a few old community bumped questions without an accepted answer having muuuuuultiple answers but absolutely no interest from the OP.

I imagine this is what went down when someone first had an idea about the community bumping: "What could be worse than having questions without an accepted answer in the site?" "..well, we could just post those questions in the front page for everyone to see!" "Haha! nice one."

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I think it was like last weekend when I last saw 4 community bumped questions within few days during a slow weekend (Meaning that first 4 of the "Top questions" were old inactive community bumped questions).

At the time of this post I counted 10 community bumped questions in the main page. All of those had absolutely nothing done to them after the bumping, aside from few new views. )

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Main point I have here is that while it might not be the demise of this website, it certainly is not very attractive and I believe it is doing more bad to this site than good.

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Took a closer look at the community bumped posts in the front page just now:

Numbers below represent the amount of questions that fit the description.

• 1 - Didn't accept for no apparent reason
• 3 - Gimp, inkscape/others question ( two of these had answers that seemed pretty legit to me )
• 1 - Question with accepted answer ( Dunno if this happened after the bump or not... )
• 1 - OP answered his own question and didn't accept.
• 1 - User from another site ( 1 answer that covers it, even though it's not as good of an answer as it could be. )
• 1 - There seemed to be people trying to figure out what the OP wanted, but OP had no interest to reply.

Answer 7

The first one I happened to click on from that list was How to get dashed line in Photoshop?. I don't care how many views it has it goes against our FAQ "But not about... Simple "How to" questions"

I agree with KMSTR and Scott, both raise very valid points. We seem to have a very small core and a lot of one shot users coming in to ask an extremely simple "How to" or "What font" question.

If we could direct things more towards complex InDesign Workflow questions, Pre-press techniques, data visualization, design theory, historical design questions (Shoutout to Farray!), label/packaging and other more interesting topics I'd be more likely to vote even if I never do label/packaging it is an interesting topic. How to make a dotted line is not.

Like you said, the simplest questions are going to get the most searches. More people have a necessity to make a dotted line than people need to know how to design a label that looks aligned properly around a curved surface.