Let's chat about Graphic Design.SE (Updated Sept. 6)

Question

In order to help Graphic Design.SE grow, I would like to get to know all of you, hear your thoughts about the site and how you think we can improve it. Meta discussions have proven more than beneficial; you've all been really great about responding to my ideas and providing great insight. But we have a chat room and I think that free-wheeling and informal format will help us devise and discuss a great variety of things to do.

I'm also the novice-iest of graphic design novices and I will probably have some (dreaded) Photoshop questions. You've been forewarned.

So I think the best thing to do is for me to have "office hours" in the chat. I will keep the Graphic Design chat open daily, while I am here at StackHQ. Please drop by and say hello! Let's make this chat active!

I will be in the chat next week on September 10th to 14th from 2PM UTC (10AM EDT) to 9PM UTC (5PM EDT). If you get in the chat and I'm not there, Ping me and I will get there ASAP.

UPDATE: Some really good things were discussed today, in what seemed to be the first active chat in a while. Fun! Please read, as some fun ideas for GD.SE were discussed. As well as chocolate, inexplicably.

Answer 1

Chat really needs a critical mass of users-who-like-chat, I suppose.

I'm possibly a generation (or two) out of phase, but I don't find chat useful or enjoyable. In theory, chat has the immediacy of a group conversation. It doesn't work that way in practice. I don't enjoy multiple overlapping and interleaved conversations, side-tracks and irrelevancies, any more than I would enjoy having to listen in on every conversation on a bus while trying to talk to a friend.

As @user568458 points out, scheduling so everyone can participate is next to impossible; our most contributive members are spread over at least three continents, so I don't have much enthusiasm for what would end up being a fairly localized chat. My own schedule depends on work load and deadlines. Some of my clients are entertainment industry, and are quite liable to hand me schedule-annihilating rush jobs "due on press tomorrow" without warning. Needless to say, I don't work a "9-to-5" schedule.

For all these reasons, chat has never appealed to me, even for a "topic of the week."

The lack of a PM facility on the site, which I would find useful, has always seemed a major omission. More than once, people have resorted to emailing me directly because they couldn't PM. (Yes, I know there's such a thing as a private chat -- but that has to be scheduled and is quite awkward to set up.)

I work with people in all parts of the world and often use Skype's IM/chat if I want to have a more immediately conversation than email, but in that case each conversation is clearly separated and can be saved as itself without spending a half hour extracting it from a sea of irrelevance. Several simultaneous conversations are easy to manage in that setting and don't all have to be in real time.

Answer 2

I posted what I thought would be a quick thought (turned into an essay...) on chat to try it out, noticing that it wasn't unusual for posts to be days apart. I hadn't reckoned on the 2px spacing between paragraphs... it's unreadable, so in the name of readability and good typesetting I'm posting it here...

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Just to drop down a quick thought - a crucial element of this puzzle that doesn't feature enough is the issue of content curation and ways of finding content. Click around http://stackexchange.com/sites looking for patterns in what's succeeding, what's surviving and what's stagnating. Obviously, proximity to programmer/geek culture is a big factor - look past that.

Another big factor seems to be the scale between sites like Stackoverflow, where problems have google-friendly hooks that people run into head first and then look for info on specifically - error messages, version numbers, function names, etc, and sites like us, History, etc, where there is great interesting content is often in questions people don't realise they should have asked until they see the answers.

(check out the History site by the way - fascinating brilliant stuff, but they're even more stuck struggling to reach out to their constituent community than we are)

There are essentially two views in SE. There's the latest questions feed, for people looking to help and create content, where stuff needing answers is pushed to people who want to help. And there's the view for people looking to consume content - which is google (which serves sites at the SO end fine, for those questions that fit the format). There isn't really any way to follow premium content and be surprised by it, other than wading through everything sorted by recency to get to it.

For us, the problem is exacebated further because a lot of our great content is surprising answers to dull-looking questions people wouldn't think to ask or give time to (until a newbie does for them) because they don't realise they're not doing something the best way. There's no clue in a list page that there's a great 5+ answer lurking in that answered, dull looking 1 vote question about something you do every day where you think your way is perfect.

What we need is some kind of 'Great content' view that is a face of the site that people can follow and get fed the best stuff - and hopefully from this, they'll get hooked and get involved. We've got just enough of a trickle of great content (=great questions + surprisingly great answers to meh questions) to fuel this sustainably, if it can be presented right.

It could be something high-tech like a page, feed, blog, digest or block down the side of the latest questions page highlighting only recent questions where question or answer have 4+ votes. Or it could be something low tech, like a 'Featured' tag that only certain high-rep people can apply a few times a week (then we show friends and colleagues the 'Featured' tag page) or a regular 'Question(s) of the day/week/month' or "Things we've learned this week" in meta or something.

It's USP in the world of things designers can follow would be the accountability, many voices, openness. For things in your specific niche, it's appeal is obvious, for things in other fields (if successful) it's an interesting low-effort insight into what's going on.

To summarise the issue: programmers (and techies, sysadmins, cooks, gamers...) come to find archive content by googling error messages (and logs, ingredients, levels...). Designers (and academics, enthusiasts...) in general discover content by following reliable sources. We've got good content, we need to give it to people in a way they can follow. The latest questions list page is, rightly, designed uncompromisingly for people who want to answer questions and for getting questions answered, not this.

It's not just us who this is an issue for - we just happen to be a site that has clear potential but is also towards the harsh end of this particular sliding scale. Loads of middling sites (engineering, religions, languages, sites like Android/Apple that have more pros but even crazier pro to drive-by ratios...) are somewhere in the middle on this scale, and even some topic areas in the high end sites are affected (best practices in SO, surprising advanced features in SU...). Get it right here, and loads of StackExchange sites will benefit.

Answer 3

I think it's a good idea to give some life to the chat. It's usually hours or even days between visits and responses. I would however consider first thinking about what the chat would be good for, apart from frequent members discussing how to improve GD.

I mentioned how I believe the chat is not completely accessible for new users, because of the rep needed to participate and because they are just not particularly encouraged, so to say. But of course, there is no clear directions on what the chat should / could be used / be good for, so giving it more publicity without any clear goals would be useless. We have a goal these days: Talk about improving the site. But part of that discussion could be how to improve the chat (ughh).

What should the chat be used for? Can we somehow generate some content around it, give it a specific purpose? I think maybe... a question of the week, or a quiz. Any ideas?