INF2165H Team 6: Anne Guo Zeng, Miranda (Yuan) Meng, Yujia Fan, Yuxin Xu, Zhuoyun Xu April 5, 2022
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In this design challenge report, we assessed Quora, a popular question-and-answer website, focusing on its shortcomings in accommodating users with accessibility and inclusiveness needs. For this project, we explored the intersectionality of English learners and people with dyslexia by discovering their common goals, constraints, and barriers to accessing Quora. As a result, we conducted secondary research, analogue comparisons, and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) evaluations to provide redesign recommendations for Quora to meet the needs of such a target group.
The report includes a detailed analysis of Quoraâs current accessibility issues, and research insights regarding the barriers of English learners with dyslexia in the context of reading, writing, and comprehending content on Quoraâs website, providing the redesign strategies for Quoraâs website
The redesign proposal includes research, prototypes, rationale, and user evaluations.
At the research stage, we discussed the reasons we chose to redesign Quora and how a redesign will benefit our target user group, and all users. We dove deep into WCAG evaluation and looked for examples of existing accessibility designs for English users with dyslexia in a similar context. At the prototype stage, we synthesized our research insights and mocked up two major user tasks (reading and writing content) with enhanced layout, dyslexia-friendly display settings, and additional functionalities to improve usersâ experience in reading, writing, and comprehending content on Quora. We invited one UX expert to participate in a heuristic evaluation and two ESL users for the A/B testing at the evaluation stage. And we also conducted one interview with a dyslexic user to collect feedback on our redesign prototypes to further validate our redesign strategies.
Quora is a question-and-answer social platform founded in 2009 by two former executives from Meta. There are many competitors in this space, but Quora manages to attract a sizable amount of active users with its unique proposition. According to Quoraâs Review in 2021, the website has 300-million unique visits per month; over a million questions and answers are added every day. On Quora, users can ask and answer each othersâ questions about all kinds of topics. They can write blogs, join âspacesâ by topic, follow, and get followed by other users. In a recent article on Vox, Schleifer (2019) depicted Quora as âa more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, (and) an opinionated Wikipediaâ.
Quora had its prime times when experts in their fields contributed to the answers, and advertisements were not allowed on the platform. However, starting in 2017, Quora has lost its sheen to its aggressive monetization strategy (Purohit, 2019). Since then, Quoraâs home page has been flooded with sponsored articles, paid ads, and low-quality content. Users and contributors are continuously spammed with invitations to join Q+, a paid version of Quora, to access ad-free and exclusive content.
We chose Quora as our project subject because these changes have significantly impacted usersâ experience and increased barriers to accessing the information on Quora, especially for those who are genuinely looking for knowledge and need assistance with reading, writing, and comprehending.
Thanks to search engine optimization, Quora has become a destination users stumble on when searching for quick answers without diving too deep into the internet (Schleifer, 2019). Up to the date of 2019, 62.7% of Quoraâs visits came from search engines. This means Quora has an extensive impact on people who are searching for answers beyond its own platform.