Rethinking the Quora iPhone App

This is going to be a very short post. First off, I am obviously a huge fan of Quora. I use the site multiple times a day. In fact, on many days, I conduct more searches on Quora than on Google (and even Twitter). I realize I’m an outlier in this regard, but that’s a significant amount of search. I’ve been using the Quora app for a few weeks now. I mostly like it. It is very quick. The ability to search for content by location is interesting, though there’s not enough local content just yet.

My main concern with Quora’s iPhone app, however, is that it was built largely with a “consumptive” experience in mind. That is, that I won’t want to write long/good answers to questions on the go (which is true) and would rather read content and sift through long reams of notifications while I’m on mobile (not true).

The reason I love Quora is that I love asking questions. Google has trained a generation to search by keyword, but as humans, as social animals, we are hard-wired to search by asking questions. And, I tend to have more questions when I’m on the go. It’s simply not easy to enter questions while I’m mobile on the Quora iPhone app.

Here’s the key: There should be a big red “Q” on the bottom navigation bar that basically asks me to enter questions.

Maybe one day I could dictate them by voice command. For now, submitting questions is not easy. It’s hard to enter them by text. I end up tweeting instead, often starting my tweets with the letter “Q” followed by the question itself. Why can’t that activity be integrated into Quora? To me, as an individual that watches Quora closely, I think of their iPhone app as more of an on-the-go input device for questions with a bit of consumption, while their iPad app would be more about reading/consumption over input.