Reply To: Streamlining the Forums View

[peter]

musicianw wrote:

Currently, the average viewer will still need to 1. scroll to reach the bottom of the page, 2. need to look for their desired sub-forum to visit. Two suggestions I can think of:

1. To have a clearer stratification between the different levels of forums Instead of DAWs, VST, non-Music, etc as a long roll on bunch of words, maybe a small return key and color coding (changing them to grey maybe) can help i.e. Deals DAWs (123, 123) VST (345, 345) non-Music (789, 789)
2. Maybe show less of the sub-forums and have visitors come in the subforum itself to choose their desired place to go, so the visitor only sees one page of the big titles: Coffee House, Deals, Digital Audio Recording etc…

The forum is going in the right direction, and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Thanks for taking the time for all of that feedback.

– Re-reading your first post, there were some misunderstanding you had. As groups — I take it you meant topics — grow, that doesn’t add more text to the Forums home page, it just provides a number.

– I get your point of a leaner Forums home page, the down side is that it doesn’t create a clearly superior user experience because you’re creting additional pages to click though and making the user dig for info. Now, you might think that’s a strong defense of this design, it’s not. If I could change it, my changes would be mostly aesthetic. I’d layout the forum and subforum text more neatly and not bunched up next to each other, which creates the crowded experience that you’re noting.  I can, of course, shorten text, but that comes at the expense of user experience too and SEO as well. The current naming is fairly economical, but there are places that can be shortened such as the category for FREE things. I don’t think there’s a compelling case to do that. Maybe subjectively, you may hate it, but does it negatively impact the user experience? Very doubtful.

2. Much of this text is dynamically generated and again, this becomes a custom coding job which is beyond my budget and I don’t see a compelling case.

3. I get into the layout in an upcoming blog post that I’ll either publish tonight or tomorrow morning. If you could give that a read, I’d be game to pick this up then.

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