With all the interest currently focused on Q&A sites, Experts Exchange actually presents an interesting turnaround opportunity. Despite the last few years of squandering goodwill with their deceptive solution to the findability/paywall paradox, they are still one of the longtime residents of the space, and they still have a massive -- albeit creaky -- corpus of questions and answers. They should hire a strong UX/UI team and do a clean-sheet redesign: new logo, new zen-like appearance without all the noisy clutter, logos, UI "junk", fake blurred out answers with "sign up now!", etc. They should set up a strong information design and analysis team to mine that huge corpus for opportunities to segment their product into paid and free components -- and then update the business model to a legitimate "freemium" approach.
I realize this is all easier said than done, but it does seem like there must be real value under the barnacles. Every time someone scrolls down past screen after screen of ads and blurred answers and has their "I see what you did there" moment, goodwill is squandered and the community impression of deception and spamminess builds.
I realize this is all easier said than done, but it does seem like there must be real value under the barnacles. Every time someone scrolls down past screen after screen of ads and blurred answers and has their "I see what you did there" moment, goodwill is squandered and the community impression of deception and spamminess builds.