I know that most discourse forums so far are probably engineer / technically focused (at least as far as the admins and I suspect many of the users - if the early beta sites are any indication). The downside of this is that I think Discourse is more complex in some areas than it needs to be for widespread adoption.
Here is the screen shot of my forum dashboard after 3 months of use. My users are virtually all non-technical, at a health-related web site - the type of site that I think is much more representative of the broader user base than the main Discourse beta sites so far.
I recommend Discourse deprecate / remove the features of āStarredā and āBookmarkā because I donāt think many regular users are going to use them and they make the interface more complex than it needs to be (which hurts adoption, and use of the forum software).
I know in startups that there is a strong tendency for feature creep - and that you are continually bombarded by new feature requests, and that the most feature requests frequently come from the more technical users. My recommendation to the discourse team is to try to get in better touch with the non-technical users because success with that user base is what will really drive successful adoption for the platform.
I didnāt say anything like that! Stars and bookmarks arenāt being stripped eitherā¦
edit. I suppose I was hijacking the topic, Iām sorry about that. I just got reminded of the defensive attitude around here. Thatās enough for me for today, thanks.
That is the crux of the debate, and I am definitely coming around to the ājust use bookmarksā idea.
It would simplify the topic list a bit (no more star on the left).
It would simplify the title of every topic slightly (no more star on the left)
We could drop the āstarredā top level nav (you can still get there from your user page)
We could drop the āstarā button at the bottom of every topic (debatable since you might want a control to bookmark the first post without going to the top here, we could just change it to ābookmarkā but meh)
It reduces the cognitive load of two concepts (star, bookmark) to one (bookmark)
Data shows that both star and bookmark are fairly rarely used, so combining them makes sense. You can still do the things that star implies, so nothing is really lost, and the simplification benefits enumerated above are nice.
The only real downside is that topic selection mode becomes more complex: how do you now enter topic selection mode since that control is over a column that no longer exists? And once you do enter topic selection mode, we have to re-add a column to the left of title again.
I donāt know if I am in the mood to do this before V1 since there is a lot of other stuff to do, and the presence of the stars is not exactly killing children at the moment.
I think you could get away with keeping a column there that is wide enough for checkboxes. To normal users, itād just be margin (the right hand margin looks wide enough). The spacing might look a little crowded when the checkboxes are visible, but I donāt think itād be too bad.
Meh is right. If I think I want to book mark the first post, make me go to the first post. I can click the little up arrow. That way I actually know what Iām bookmarking.
If its the topic Iām interested in, I can watch or track it when I get to the bottom.
Yeah, as far as I can tell stars are just an alias for bookmarking a threadā¦ could the usage of stars just straight replace bookmarking? So starring the first post would star the thread (and vice versa).
Also iirc since starring makes you ātrackā the thread too - maybe keep this behaviour and apply it to bookmarks? I.e. you are notified by replies to your starred posts.
This way you have the same expectations and capabilities (star = track this thing for me), but one less symbol to remember (also ābookmarkingā is kind of an awkward feature name).
The problem with this is that right now the last post you read in a thread gets a special ālast readā bookmark state (and turns red instead of blue)ā¦ I think itād be a bit more confusing if that suddenly became a ālast readā starā¦ Bookmark feels more appropriate in the context of that specific use case
It clutters the interface, makes the product more complex than necessary (confuses users), and takes engineering / testing/ support (both for Discourse and the forum admins - telling people what it does and why its there) resources that could be applied to more important / more used features (IMHO).
Now that I understood Bookmarks, I think theyāre very useful. Stars is on the topic level, bookmarks on the post level - very useful in long threads. Maybe these features just need a little tooltip explanation or so.
I have had about 10 starred topics and 10 bookmarks here on meta.
Iāve recently converted all my stars to bookmarks on the first post to see how it would feel if we lose stars.
I do like the fact that now I go straight to the first post though on those topics, which is what I really cared about.
But the thing I miss is the starred topic list tab.
Not so much because its too hard to get to the user profile bookmark tab (though I think a shortcut in the avatar dropdown would be better), but mainly because I think the UI on the bookmark tab of the user page is a little harder to parse than the simple topic list when youāre looking for something.
What if there was a tab that replaced āstarredā that listed all the topics you have bookmarks in? then clicking on that topic scrolls you to the first bookmark you madeā¦ then you could bookmark the first post and have it work the same way as stars currently do. Would that make sense?
I could also envision replacing the stars with the new/unread statusā¦ though thatās a bit tricky because sometimes thereās both a new and unread numberā¦ not a fully formed idea yet
Considering how rare the bookmark feature is used anyway, I donāt think its all that critical to address the mutliple-bookmarks within a topic any more elegantly now. (It could come later if people complain enough to drive its development).
It makes sense. Iām not digging the look of it as mocked up - I think just because of the bubbly blue-ness. If its over there, Iām not sure the light blue is needed anymore to make it stand out. I think you could fall back on a monochrome icon design for new/unread if its placed so neatly in a column.
Sorry for the tangent, but why are there ever both numbers? I donāt understand how that can happen or what it means (though Iāve seen it before). Wouldnāt it make sense to have the unread count trump the new icon?
The other UI āgotchaā with the idea of having a ābookmarksā tab is the overloaded meaning of the bookmark icon. Do we then need to have a red bookmark logo for unread, and a blue one for bookmarks?
