Question

Give us the option to define a question title that will be displayed on the question list. If this option is left blank, then you can display the first few characters of the question, as you're doing now.

Answer 1

right right! i would LOVE to see what category a question is before i look into it...this is handy for people who LOVE doing intros rather than asking the question i.e. "this question is gonna help me graduate and it's like 3 am where i am in and i really need an answer to this question. I am an ADHD dyslexic so a direct answer would be appreciated"

Answer 2

I'm not so sure this makes sense. Questions don't really have titles, per se. They are typically numbered, but that doesn't make much sense. Additionally, to make a title that's relevant requires an understanding of the problem that the asker likely does not have (that's why they're here).

Just my 2 cents.

Answer 3

i just wanted to do a satirical comment *whistle*

Answer 4

y shud there be a title?

Answer 5

As you're scrolling through the list of questions, you just get the first 20-25 words or so of the questions that are being asked. This may or may not be a good representation of the question. A title gives the asker the option to briefly present the kind of question they're asking. For example, an asker could title their question "Trigonometry Ladder Problem." People scrolling through the questions would instantly know what kind of problem they were asking. This is more efficient than something like "A 20-ft ladder is leaning against a building. If the base of the ladder is 6 ft from the base of the building, what is the angle of elevation of the..."
The answerers do not need to see that much detail on the problem to decide whether or not to look further into them.

Imagine a library where instead of titles, the covers of all the books simply have the first 200 characters on the cover. It would take you significantly longer to scan and find the book you are looking for. It's the same situation here. I don't need a damned paragraph to know what kind of problem the person is asking about. Nor do I want to give a paragraph while presenting my own problems. When scanning through problems, I simply want a brief description. That will help me decide which problems to look into. Reduce clutter. Increase efficiency. Clean and simple.

Answer 6

Hello SmoothMath!

This is a good suggestion. Thank you! We used to have this feature, but we changed it. Let me explain why:

1. As farmdawgnation pointed out correctly, often times people don't have an understanding of the question to be able to come up with a title that makes the question recognizable for the answerer.

2. We also wanted to encourage brevity in the questions, so that people don't type in entire assignments.

3. The most important reason is that we wanted question asking to be as quick and easy as possible. Right now, it just consists of one step. There was a time when we had question titles, descriptions, attachments, categories, tags - this resulted in a lot fewer people asking questions and generally being frustrated. People want to get help as soon as possible, so we allow them to ask questions asap.


All that said, we are definitely considering adding some optional features so that askers who have more time can craft more detailed questions with categories, titles, equations, attachments etc, while at the same time users in a hurry can just ask in one step.
I'll definitely add this to the list of ideas to consider when we improve the question flow.

Answer 7

Heck, people are doing this already. In the question box, they type what is effectively a title. Then they make their first post the actual question. It's the natural intuitive way to do things.
http://openstudy.com/study#/updates/4fb12a80e4b05565342722f8

Answer 8

Feels like the Apple model of product design... -_-
starting from the assumption that your users are idiots who will be confused by anything more than a big shiny button.

Maybe it's a wise assumption though. I don't know. Certainly works for apple.

Answer 9

We have nothing but the highest respect for our users. We don't think of them as idiots. We want the interface to get out of their way and for them to finish their tasks as soon as possible.

The reason we start very simple and build on that is so we can figure out easily what works and what doesn't. We want to get to the core use cases for our users and let them complete these without any distractions. We then see how people use it and add shortcuts for power users. An example of this is the answer field - for the longest time we didn't have equations or attachments or drawings, but people were still able to reply with basic functionality.

Answer 10

Reasonable.

Answer 11

I want to re-iterate, though, SmoothMath, that we really appreciate all your feedback. Please keep it coming. I definitely see merit in this suggestion - it is a way to make it easier for answerers to recognize which questions they would want to answer. I will definitely bring it up when we touch up the ask flow.