How do you objectively quantify a discoverability problem if the designer insists it is your fault that you can't find something?
I am an user of this network of sites, which has a subsite for every occasion. They are quite touchy if you ask your question in the wrong site.
The problem is you can't easily tell what site is for what. For example, there is a site for when you are stuck while programming and there is a another site for when you are a programmer. I vaguely remember that in both sites they don't like questions about a programmer's career, but I was not sure so I wanted to double check, but I could not find the subpage that explains what topics are welcome and what are taboo even though I knew it was somewhere there.
For your consideration this is their landing page and this is where you ask new question. As you can see there are links to
- how to ask
- ask on meta
- help centre
- asking help
- formatting help
- and once again asking help
plus header help dropdown and huge footer.
I have scanned some of the links but could not find any eye popping "on topic/off topic" list. So as a good netizen I went to ask on their meta only to discover this is very very common problem. To my surprise, when I pointed our that there may be a discoverability problem I was told that the on topic/off topic info is clearly there under "that link" if only you click on "that menu" (kind of).
How do I quantify a discoverability issue to someone who thinks there is no such problem (despite at least 277 out of 5,658 meta questions being of this sort)?
Is this even a discoverability issue? If not, how would you categorise it? Information architecture?