A little over three weeks ago, Our goal was to make resources easier to find, as well as improve navigation, accessibility, and enhance our mobile interface to create a more helpful, inclusive, and informative forums experience. We understand that a change of this scale can take time to adjust to, and we have adopted an iterative and data-driven approach to continue refining the experience. This is just one part of the changes we have made and are continuing to make. You may have noticed a new Community Blog, Events, and Profile experience. Your engagement with these sections and the ways they’ve supported other community members have directly influenced the changes we’ve been making. Our community has grown quite a bit over the past few years, and this initiative is intended to help community members at all levels and stages in their professional journey.
We’ve heard your feedback about the new forums design and recognize that some changes may feel disruptive, especially given how familiar many of you were with the previous design that had been in place for several years. Your input is invaluable to us, and we’re committed to addressing your concerns transparently.
Why Did We Make These Changes?
During our office hours, a community member shared, “My main interaction with Autodesk is using the software. Visiting the forums is secondary.” He explained that he often uses a search engine to find what he needs in community. If the link he clicks doesn’t give him the answers he is looking for, he goes back to search. We also learned that several community members heavily rely on notifications to keep track of the discussions they are part of. This reflects the experience of many of our community members. While these methods have been effective to an extent, they also highlight the data and feedback we have received, indicating that the current experience can be challenging to navigate and locate information. Community is where customers turn to when they have questions about using their software, want to learn about specific features or functions, share ideas about product improvements, or connect with other people who understand their challenges, frustrations and successes. However, how valuable is Community if this information is difficult to find or if key resources that could add value are missing?
As the Community grows and we introduce new products, the volume of information will increase, further compounding the challenge of finding helpful content. Recognizing the wealth of information and expertise our community members share every day, we wanted to make it easier to find and discover relevant content.
Most Reported Concerns and Resolutions
Our team has been collating your feedback, capturing your views and we have taken a data-driven approach to address your concerns.
Trending Tab vs. All Tab
- Concern: Many of you expressed frustration with the "Trending" tab being the default, especially when revisiting a board multiple times a day. Many preferred seeing the "All" tab more frequently, to get a broader view of content.
- Resolution: We’ve made the "All" tab the default because the way community members were engaging with it across all the boards consistently showed this was the preferred tab.
Read vs. Unread Posts
- Concern: Many of you have also requested a clearer way to distinguish between read and unread posts.
- Resolution: We’ve partially resolved this issue and are working on a fix to better emphasize already-read topics with new replies for improved visibility.
White Space
- Concern: There have been concerns regarding the dense spacing of the new forums, highlighting that it reduces usability.
- Resolution: To reiterate, we de-crowded the layout to enhance overall functionality, and balance accessibility by providing a more inclusive experience for our mobile community members and people with disabilities. The purpose of the white spacing was to reduce visual clutter, separate the elements, making content easier to read and process. However, we acknowledge your feedback and will have fixes to enhance specific sections over-impacted by this dense spacing by the end of next week.
Pinned Posts
- Concern: There were also concerns regarding the visibility of pinned posts, making it difficult to locate important content.
- Resolution: We’ve improved the visibility of pinned post titles and have additional updates scheduled for next week to make these posts even more prominent.
Office Hours
We are now hosting weekly office hours to provide you with a more direct way to voice your feedback and collaborate with the team that is driving these changes. These sessions are intended to be unstructured, open forums to provide space for you to discuss your thoughts with us.
In our most recent session, held yesterday, we listened to your insights and are continuing to explore the following:
- Ability to switch off the experiment: While this option may not be implemented for the current experiment to ensure we reach statistical significance and maintain data integrity; we will consider incorporating this approach for future major iterations.
- “Back to topic listing” link at the bottom of long forum topic discussions: There are further opportunities to improve navigation and reduce scrolling time, these will be addressed in the future releases.
- Re-imagine the placements of the content sections: By the end of next week, we will have a fix to de-emphasize the “Trending topics and solutions” section based on engagement data.
- Ability to see subsequent pinned posts beyond the first one more clearly: More fixes are coming up regarding this concern. Stay tuned!
- Old events content: We recognize that some boards are displaying older event contents, and we are looking into a solution for this.
- Search on specific boards: Work is in progress to ensure that the search function defaults to only show content from the board from within which you are searching.
- Topic Tags: In the future, we will be implementing mandated & pre-defined topic tags to refine the tagging on community, making them for useful for content discoverability.
- Other: We also discussed difficulties finding created posts, labelling product versions, search improvements and more.
Check out the recording of this office hours on its event page. We encourage you to join future sessions and share your thoughts. Thank you for your patience, collaboration, and continued engagement as we work toward making the community a better space for everyone!
