Discourse Design team experimentation topic

Contribute UX

AI-generated summary

The Discourse Design Team utilizes this topic to document and track UX experiments on Meta, with outcomes resulting in promotion to core, abandonment, or shipping as dedicated theme components. To view changes, users must join the @discourse-design-experiments group. The team maintains a table of experiments, noting that several have been successfully merged into Discourse, including Details styling, Copy quote to clipboard, Full Screen Login, Select colour variable, Header Shadow Removal, Sidebar Feng Shui, and Improved code block font sizing. Other experiments, such as the Simplified topic map and Updated notification menu, are scheduled for future core integration or are under consideration. Community feedback is actively encouraged, with discussions often separated into dedicated topics. Notable community suggestions include tpetrov proposing a voting mechanism for features to capture silent preferences, a concept JammyDodger supports as a potential new experiment. jordan.vidrine clarifies that voting would likely scope to specific feedback topics, while JammyDodger notes technical constraints regarding category versus tag voting. Additionally, chapoi urged a decision on the Hide text in text select popup experiment due to its duration. The team continues to launch new initiatives, such as the recent New header dropdown / notification menu styles.

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This topic will house the Discourse Design Team’s current experiments running on Meta. We will document what the current running experiments are here in this topic in a table.

After a test run of an experiment, each one will get a final decision from our team:

  • Promote to core, or
  • Abandon, or
  • Ship in dedicated theme component

Please feel free to let us know what you think of any of the ongoing experiments we are currently working on. As discussion takes place, we will separate the conversation into topics of their own.

Experiment Started Status End
Improving dismiss button navigation (mobile) October 31 2025 Experiment Ongoing
Details styling November 13,2023 Merged into Discourse :rocket: 2023-12-04T22:00:00Z
Copy quote to clipboard November 13,2023 Merged into Discourse :rocket: 2024-01-07T14:00:00Z
Full Screen Login November 21, 2023 Merged into Discourse :rocket: 2023-12-19T06:00:00Z
Hide text in text select popup 2023-12-05T06:00:00Z Will bring into Core at a later date 2024-01-29T06:00:00Z
Emoji line-height Adjustment 2023-12-19T06:00:00Z Paused 2024-01-02T06:00:00Z
Embedded Replies 2024-01-04T06:00:00Z Merged 2024-05-08T05:00:00Z
Select colour variable Jan 22, 2024 Merged into core for default schemes Jan 30 2022
Simplified topic map 2024-05-10T04:00:00Z Will bring into Core at a later date 2024-07-02T04:00:00Z
Header Shadow Removal 2024-05-15T05:00:00Z Merged into Discourse :rocket: 2024-07-10T05:00:00Z
New sidebar experiment (Sidebar Feng Shui) 2024-08-06T05:00:00Z Merged into Discourse :rocket: 2024-10-08T05:00:00Z
Share your feedback about updated notification menu! 2024-08-06T04:00:00Z Core feature, considering default
Improved code block sizing & color scheme 2024-10-31T14:00:00Z Merged into Discourse :rocket: 2024-11-20T06:00:00Z
Enlarged chat avatars in sidebar 2024-11-26T06:00:00Z Merged into Discourse 2025-07-02T22:00:00Z
New onebox styling 2024-12-10T06:00:00Z Merged into Discourse 2025-05-30T05:00:00Z
New header menu styles 2025-06-10T05:00:00Z Merged into Discourse 2025-07-24T05:00:00Z
Permanent fullscreen composer on mobile 18 Jul 2025 UX: always keep mobile composer at fullscreen by chapoi · Pull Request #34358 · discourse/discourse · GitHub
61 Likes
Post quote copy to clipboard button -- Feedback
Hide details button style
Displaying Views in Topic view (with no replies)
Full Screen Login & Create Account
New themes & components layout
How to get this new topic map that shows 'likes' first of all others
Post quote copy to clipboard button -- Feedback
New header dropdown / notification menu styles
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The experimentation topic is a great idea!
Would it make sense to have voting? I think some people might like/dislike a feature, but are less vocal, or don’t have much more to add to the conversation than “like it/don’t like it”.

5 Likes
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Feature (/ux) voting on meta has cropped up a couple of times. I wonder if now would be a good time to have an experiment in that?

What do you think @sam @mcwumbly @jordan.vidrine?

8 Likes
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That could be interesting. It would only be scoped to the specific “feedback” topics tied to the experiments right?

2 Likes
11

I think the topic voting plugin can only currently do categories and not tags, so it would be enabled for all Contribute > Feature and Contribute > UX topics (though not all Contribute > UX topics would really be ‘votable’ ones as it houses some non-breaking visual bugs as well as ux improvements).

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14

@jordan.vidrine Think we need to make a decision about this one. Been on for more than a month. Based on the feedback topic, I think we can merge?

6 Likes
21

9 posts were split to a new topic: Feedback on new fullscreen signup / login designs

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Just an update, we have a new experiment here on meta for the header menu styling.

New header dropdown / notification menu styles

2 Likes
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A post was merged into an existing topic: New header dropdown / notification menu styles

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A post was split to a new topic: Finding Discourse design resources