Mahalo fail the mom test again #mahalo

Mahalo is great but fail the mom test. I have a prescription to solve a huge problem on mahalo front page.

Recently Mahalo change is home page. The new home page is beautiful. It’s mahalo 3.0.

I love it. I love it so much that I invite my mom to test it. She had a very specific question.

Why should I switch from xp to windows 7 right now?

She writes the question in the big fat box with “ask” in front of that box.

ask question mahalo

This is where it gets ugly. She has to fill up a form to submit her question.

After she fills up that form she has to subscribe to Mahalo.

She stares at me and said your website it’s complicate. All I want is an answer.

No one can blame her for that right?

I see one huge problem in mahalo home page.

There are two boxes! This is a huge problem.

front page mahalo

The same question lead to two different outcomes.

One box leads to an answer the other lead to nowhere.(almost)

This is the problem: mahalo.com has no relationship with mahalo answers.

I ask the same question in the search box at the top. I get the right answer right now as you can see.

mahalo result pages

This is a huge problem I think for mahalo. They need to connect both mahalo answers and mahalo pages to have one search page.

This is my prescription for mahalo:

ONE big fat search bar!

You ask a question. You may receive an answer directly from mahalo pages.

No answer there. It should lead you to request an answer from the community. The same way as it is right now.

I think mahalo will be more useful that way.

A small change can lead mahalo to not fail the mom test.