Feedbacks on Discourse: The power behind this forum

Feedback & Problem Solving
#1

Hi everybody!

I’m a contributor and users of Discourse which is the application that make this forum running.
I believe this Discourse is great and full of interesting funtionallity, even the UI is not so bad.
But, for some reasons, is still quite difficult to use and many features remain undiscovered.
I would like to help there to improve the UX, i have some experience with UX but getting feedbacks from a community of UX experts that use Discourse… is just perfect! :smiley:

I notice that you have done some small but great improvements to the forum like divide static pages, reorganize the hamburger menu content, link people to wherever they can update their nickname…
All stuff that we are currently discussing. Awesome!

I would like to ask you two simple questions:
1. What would be the most important thing you would imporve in Discourse forum app?
2. What do you think badges system in Discourse? (and also more in general)

It would be awesome to hear some opinions!

If someone would like to spend little more time on this, here are two topics that we are discussing now and are in need or more UX experts brains :wink:
making badges more discoverable
header bar improvements

2 Likes
#2

Welcome Giorgia,
I wanted say a quick hi, and acknowledge your post.
It’s Easter so I don’t have the time to commit to a proper answer right now but I’ll come back to it next week. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

Hi Giorgia,
I’m back, as promised.

The initial entry view. Discourse initially presents as a pretty heavy wall of text with very little in the way of funnelling new users into the content/categories/groups that they need in order to connect.

I like the flexibility around adding and customising badges here, but I think that the sheer number of default badges that Discourse supplies out of the box is ridiculous. They lose all value because no one has to work to get them. I’d definitely prefer that badges were switched off by default.

#4

As an aside – are you specifically looking for feedback in the two areas above, or would you like to hear about the more general UX struggles people are having with Discourse?

#5

@HAWK thank you very much for your feedbacks!
I also thought that first page is the one most in need of redesign. But then i talk with core team in Discourse and they actually make me realize that:

About badges:
I completely agree with this sentence: "They lose all value because no one has to work to get them."
Which it goes in against the idea of badges. Badges are introduce in a system to stimulate users, but if they are earned without doing nothing, is just more visual noise… or a notification more.

In this moment i still not focusing in any particular area so yes general UX struggles are welcome and after that i can collect what’s is the part more in need.
For sure we would like to work on badges.
The topic already come up many times in meta.discourse, the idea now is to make some badges more highlight respect others so just the important one would be under the attention of user.
I also propose to introduce an icon in the header to make easier for the users to find and discover about badges system. From different feedbacks look like many users didn’t really notice the notification about badges.

#6

That does offer some flexibility, agreed, but I don’t feel it’s as powerful as some of the other platforms that pull in different kinds of content and allow you to build really specific funnels.

I completely agree with the point around a diverse audience, and in theory the open-source nature of this platform means that you can do what you like with it. The reality for most customers is that the amount of work and money to upkeep that is insurmountable.

We’re actually working on building something to address this in another Discourse community that I manage. I’ll keep you posted.

Do you mind if I edit the title of this topic? I think we might get more responses if it is something like “What do you find the most difficult about this forum?”