Reply To: Streamlining the Forums View

[peter]

On peter said

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.

The Guy Who Started This Thing and Still Can’t Beat Larry at Getting Deals Up First

To hear some of the music I’ve recently recorded: https://soundcloud.com/user-345532605?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

I forgot to mention it, but I didn’t understand what you wrote here:

“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.”

What does page 2 mean? There are no additional pages for the forum home page, just one page. Could you clarify you meant? Like any web page, how far you scroll is related to your browser settings. Since I’ve tightened up the forums home page, it’s going to be 1 page on most browsers unless someone sets their fonts exceptionally large due to impaired vision.

 

What does need to look to page two for their desired sub forum to visit. The layout of the site puts the forums and sub forums on the forums landing page. If you compared that to Cakewalk Forums the user goes to the home page, can’t find Deals anywhere on the page, however, if they were lucky enough to guess it’s a subforum of the Coffee House, it’s the next click, so it’s two clicks to the a subforum. LinkedMusicians is one click to the forums or subforums. My take from comparing Cakewalk Forums and LinkedMusicians is that there’s clearly more clicking for the user to get places at Cakewalk Forums. Clearly a user experience manager didn’t advise, or wasn’t listened to when it came to hiding the Deals subforum and having no reference for it on the forums home page. I think most folks don’t realize that because they’ve gone directly to the Deals subforum.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music.