Quora is a very popular new service from the ex-CTO of Facebook. Here’s an image of part of the main page:
The top bar shows an entry box followed by what looks like a button with the text “Add Question”. One assumes the two are related because there’s they’re in the same black box, so the expected behavior is that you would enter a question in that top box and click the “Add Question” button.
Initially, when you first come to this site, you browse a bit, then think about a question you might be interested in and want to search, and spend a bunch of time looking for the search box, then throw up your hands and say “How can this site not have search???” It does – the “Add Question” is completely unrelated to the text field. The text field is the search box, and has not button associated with it because it’s Ajax-driven and shows possible search topics as you type it.
This is a hugely popular site. Draw your own conclusions.
Darienne Jordan
Cherryl Pereira
The “Add question” button is actually related to the field.
For example, if you type the text “how can I lose weight?” in the field, you’ll get some potential matches to that question in the results. At this moment you have several options. You can 1) click on one of the results if it’s a close match, 2) perform a full search on the text you entered, or if neither of those options satisfy you, you can 3) click the “add question” button to start the process of adding that question to the site.
I wouldn’t deny, however, that the entire mechanism is nonstandard at best and confusing at worst.
Yes, but the problem is that you spend a bunch of time looking for search because you think this is just for adding questions. I agree that once you start typing you do see how it works and things start to fall in place.