I shared in a previous post that my team - the Product Team responsible for the Community redesign - will be communicating with you all via these blog posts. Let me reiterate that the goal of our community modernization project, which includes the redesign of the Blogs, Events, Profile, and most recently the Forums, is to make resources easier to discover and find, improve navigation, enhance accessibility, and improve our mobile interface to create a more helpful, inclusive, and informative community experience. However, our work is far from done. We will continue to make design updates informed by how the community is engaging with the new features, your feedback on the Forum threads and your insights from our office hours.
In today’s post, I wanted to share some of the updates we’ve made as well as a recap from our last two office hours meetings held this week.
Design Updates Since December 6, 2024
We’ve listened to your feedback and taken some actions. Based on your input, we’ve made the following updates to make the new forums more valuable for you.
More Pinned Post Updates: We received feedback that the visibility of the pinned posts could be improved. Many of you prefer to see all the pinned posts at once, reducing the need to scroll through one pin at a time.
Here's what we did to address it:
We’ve made changes to the pinned posts section, highlighting the pin icon and changing the section’s background color to grey to place more visual emphasis. Also, pinned posts now display in rotation. On your first visit, you’ll see the pinned post based on recency and on subsequent visits, the next pinned post will be shown dynamically, improving visibility for other pinned content. We’re taking a less drastic approach with these updates to avoid impacting experiment data and will continue exploring ways to improve visibility.
Read vs. Unread Topics:
When a new reply is added to a previously read topic, the bold styling on the topic title, topic creator name, and last reply creator name is now retained. This follows the same logic as an unread topic, ensuring new replies are clearly visible.
Making Activity Stream the Main Section:
Based on user engagement data and your feedback, we’ve prioritized the Activity Stream section. It is now emphasized as the primary section, with the Trending Topics and Solutions section moved directly below it.
Other Improvements:
We’ve made some border spacing adjustments to the header and various sections as an initial attempt to address the white spacing feedback, while maintaining a balance for both mobile and accessibility experiences, as I mentioned in my last post. We expect to roll-out more solutions for this issue in weeks to come.
Office Hours Recap (December 9th, 2024)
Showing Ranks on the Activity Stream:
We received feedback that displaying rank icons in the Activity Stream section helps community members prioritize topics requiring engagement. We agree that this is a fair point. However, the competing colors caused distraction from a visual design perspective. Also, our community members have said that rank icons are more meaningful than rank names. We’re exploring alternative solutions to address these challenges and will share updates soon.
Removal of Last Reply Date:
Some of you said that a combination of the last reply date and the ranking icon helps you prioritize the topics that still require your support and engagement. We wanted to keep the topic listing focused on primary information to reduce clutter and align with visual design best practices. We are exploring changes to ensure that you have the most useful information from the list, while balancing this with clutter reduction.
Leaderboard vs. Top Contributors:
The old Leaderboard section had very little engagement and often featured the same profiles repeatedly. To encourage more participation by the vast majority of our community members, we introduced the Top Contributors section, which combines data points such as likes, views, and comments. I want you to know that we have a larger gamification strategy, and this input is valuable to help define our strategy.
Highlighting Popular Topics for Support:
When customers encounter issues, they often turn to Forums even though their primary interaction with Autodesk is through its software. Our vision for the Trending Topics and Solutions section is to aggregate relevant threads, similar to a “known issues and workarounds” resource or support documentation from the product teams. In the future, this will help surface older forum posts that provide helpful content, reducing the time and effort needed to find answers.
Threading:
We plan to enable threading on forum posts soon across Community, however threading remains user configurable if you prefer linear replies.
Office Hours Recap (December 12th, 2024)
Too Much White Space (Especially for Larger Screens):
Some of you have expressed concerns about the desktop experience being degraded to accommodate mobile design priorities. As mentioned in the previous blog, we de-crowded the layout to reduce visual clutter and create a more balanced and accessible experience. We understand the concern about excessive white space for those using larger screens. We’ve already deployed some releases to address this as I mentioned above, and we will continue to monitor this.
Breadcrumbs Issues:
Some of you also mentioned that the breadcrumb navigation is not visible enough, making it harder to trace back your steps or understand your location within the forums. As part of the larger redesign, we have improvements lined up to further enhance navigation. I’ll be sharing more updates on this shortly.
Finding Events and Blog Posts:
We’ve heard that finding the office hours events and blog posts is challenging. We are exploring ways to bring this content directly to the components on the boards. Stay tuned!
Making Content Useful:
The new designs cater for community members who don’t log in every day, which make the vast majority of our visits. These content sections are intended to showcase learning and help related content, that would be useful to provide support. I know at its current state, this is not the case. We recognize that the value of the sections is diminished if the content itself is not useful. We are committed to ensuring that every section is populated with relevant, high-quality content that meets your needs. Future iterations will include integrations with more learning content. More updates on this shortly!
For more active community members, our vision is to create a logged-in state where you can easily access personalized content, reducing reliance on notifications or bookmarks. It is intended to make content easier to find.
Dividers Between Posts:
The divider lines between posts were noted as too light, compared to the old designs, making them less visible. We’re reviewing this feedback for upcoming updates.
Communication: We’re making changes to the way we manage communication to our community. Our team will be sharing this information on the Forums.
Other Topics Already Addressed:
- Pinned Posts Concern: Updates to improve pinned post visibility have already been deployed, as mentioned at the start of this post.
- Trending Topics and Solutions Content Sections: These sections have also seen improvements, as noted earlier.
Looking Ahead
Our final office hours for the year 2024 will take place next week Thursday – December 19th and we’ll resume these sessions in January 2025. I encourage you to attend and share your thoughts.
Thank you for your continued engagement!
