Now what?

Decisions & principles for the first version of Quora

Some interesting design thinking coming out of a new startup called Quora (drop me a comment if you want an invite). One of their designers shared their thoughts here. These notes stood out:

Picking a starting point is important because it will be the axis the rest of the design revolves around — but it’s not always the first page in the flow. You should start with the page that serves the most significant goals of the product.

Probably my first three months at Quora were spent designing and undesigning only the question page

A lot of decent features have been dropped or hidden or otherwise cut to help ensure that only the most important information is on any given page.

But it wasn’t until things got ruthless that any progress was made.

A user interface is the product of a design. A design is a set of decisions about a particular product. Those decisions represent the product’s goals and ambitions.