Community » BeWelcome Forum

Hey Claudia,

You make some good point that I am sure in most cases are pretty well known in the design/dev team. I would add the following remarks:

• It seems to me that the current state of the forums is a direct result of the many cool things that have been added very recently (tags, geotags, etc). Obviously the capabilities of those systems haven't been fine-tuned yet.
• Most of the central areas (profile, forum, groups and dashboard) deserve a design approach where we think about everything at once: the way areas interact, the position you come to expect links and buttons, what is "most important", etc. I think merely working on the forum design by itself will just have it diverge from the rest, whereas we definitely should be thinking about design consistency as well.

It looks to me that a few design efforts (forum, dashboard and profile especially) should be combined into one effort to make them consistent and easy to use.

Cheers,
Thomas

Should't we rather provide a good selection of categories on the forum start page? I assume most users just click on "New Topic" to start a thread. This makes it's harder and harder to find topics in which a certain user might be interested. Most of the forums are structured like this.

I am not sure if a list of the last topics attracts people who uses the forum for the first time. But maybe it would be good to hear the opinion from a "newbie" after only experienced forum users wrote their statement here ;-)

Considering the fact that we'll be polling the community, how about questions we can ask them instead of assumptions?

If you can write what you need to know about forum usage in disagree-agree terms (a statement with which the user can agree or disagree with varying degrees), I'll make sure it gets included.

Thomas

I think it's a good idea to have one start page with main categories and groups.

The category display should be more than just a list of links. Instead, we should show them in a table with numbers for the latest activity, number of unread topics, etc. Similar to what we know from existing forum software.

We should show three such tables (or one table, but with visually separated blocks):

* Thematic categories (as we have them)

* Region categories. This could be the continents, but it could also be tailored to the user's location, or locations the user is interested in. In any case, we don't want that section to become too long, because there is something below.

* Groups the user is a member of.

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Then we want a separate page with latest activity for all or subscribed topics. 

I think that's more or less what we need.

Layout / Graphics:
- The tables are floating in a sea of nothing, so I think they should have more graphical left and right borders.
- The author + date could be stretched a bit, so it would fit in 2 rows instead of 3. Then we could show more stuff above the fold.

Information Display:
- More semantic graphical icons and effects, to visualize the age of the last post, to separate places from categories, etc.
- Number of unread posts? Number of new unread posts? Age of unread posts?

Content:
- Personalized places? I think this would make sense for the future, but right now we don't have that many place-related topics anyway. So let's keep an eye on this.
- My groups. Maybe this can be split in "local groups" and "topic groups"

Overlapping categories?

I think the point of a category-based forum is to have truly disjoint containers. Why:
- You can go through the disjoint containers one after the other, and in the end you can be sure that you have seen everything you wanted to see. Esp, you did not miss anything, and you did not see anything twice.
- Every item in the tree structure (and a nested structure of disjoint containers is a tree structure) has a unique location, giving a clear concept of telling where you are.

As far as I know, the place categories can overlap with the general categories. To get really disjoint categories, we would have to take out the places from the list, and display them in a different way. I'm not sure about this.

Also we need to force people to choose a category for new posts. Either by visiting that category page before clicking "New forum topic", or by a mandatory dropdown select field on topic creation.

I absolutley agree. As the ideas in the screen shot takes a while. Therefore I suggest to start with

a) move categories, tag cloud and  continent links into the sidebar.

b) second step: add some tracking to the links if they are actually used by the members.

c) in the long run start with the new forum as shown in the screen shot.

@claudia

Sure we need not to bore people with volunteer stuff. But as long as the community is not that active .. why not showing what is going on!

I don't know how the forum works but it looks like i receive mails of it, so I wanted to react on the topic Facebook, as it seams somehow inpossible to react by mail. Anyway my appologies if this isn't the right place to react on this, but I find the website very complicated.

Facebook can be a useful thing (for websites and initiatives that already work fine) but let us first make sure, Be Welcome members become more active and that everyone (including myself) has the possibility and knows how to upload a picture on his or her profile (so we don’t have to refer to hotmail/msn or Facebook if another member wants to see our pictures)! Anyone who can help?