Good job! This is awesome. There's a lot of useful observations here, but here are a few I'd highlight specifically:

The default copy in the hero is kinda goofy. It has that, "No charge - EVER. Enter your credit card below!" vibe. This actually got fixed on SO:

Normally, weird copy getting updated would get pushed to all sites, assuming it makes sense, but in this case, it was discovered in the context of some SO-specific A/B tests, so that didn't happen. We'll work on fixing that ASAP.

The absence of an "answer" button on closed questions is bad UX. It's happening more on HR due to the higher close rate, but it's sub-optimal anywhere: Sometimes a button isn't where the user expects it to be, and the only signal for why (that the question is closed) is off-screen, plus it requires you to know something most people won't intuit (that closed questions won't accept new answers). I personally hadn't seen that raised before. It's slightly more work - requires some minor design thought on whether to grey out a button, what copy to use, etc. But I think it's low cost to benefit - we'll look at adding something there.

The "ask question" page (and sidebar guidance specifically) aren't really great at helping new users be successful. I think your points here are dead-on, and this one needs more work than what you've described. At some point not-too-far-off, I'd like to see us put some real work into more of a "guided" version of how to ask, with more structured fields ("What did you want to happen?", "What was the actual result", etc.), and some guidance for each that's not easy to miss. I also like enderland's Pre-fill question-box with text for new users (A/B study proposal), or something similar. This needs a bit more time available to kickoff, but I really want to see if we can't devote some focus to this page before this year's up.

Good job! This is awesome. There's a lot of useful observations here, but here are a few I'd highlight specifically:

The default copy in the hero is kinda goofy. It has that, "No charge - EVER. Enter your credit card below!" vibe. This actually got fixed on SO:

Normally, weird copy getting updated would get pushed to all sites, assuming it makes sense, but in this case, it was discovered in the context of some SO-specific A/B tests, so that didn't happen. We'll work on fixing that ASAP.

The absence of an "answer" button on closed questions is bad UX. It's happening more on HR due to the higher close rate, but it's sub-optimal anywhere: Sometimes a button isn't where the user expects it to be, and the only signal for why (that the question is closed) is off-screen, plus it requires you to know something most people won't intuit (that closed questions won't accept new answers). I personally hadn't seen that raised before. It's slightly more work - requires some minor design thought on whether to grey out a button, what copy to use, etc. But I think it's low cost to benefit - we'll look at adding something there.

The "ask question" page (and sidebar guidance specifically) aren't really great at helping new users be successful. I think your points here are dead-on, and this one needs more work than what you've described. At some point not-too-far-off, I'd like to see us put some real work into more of a "guided" version of how to ask, with more structured fields ("What did you want to happen?", "What was the actual result", etc.), and some guidance for each that's not easy to miss. I also like enderland's Pre-fill question-box with text for new users (A/B study proposal), or something similar. This needs a bit more time available to kickoff, but I really want to see if we can't devote some focus to this page before this year's up.