Hi guys, Im about to start using discourse in a community. As much as I love Discourse… I dislike the UI/UX of it. Subjectively, it is when starting at it as a user somehow unintuitive. As the title says, Id like to practice some feng shui for the beginning and reduce discourse UI to a minimum, until users got more and more onboarded. With time… we would activate feature per feature, step by step, depending on what the community likes to add.
Im looking for some recommendations of what engines we could turn off for the start, and what we need as a bare minimum.
Additionally, I’d like to learn from you how we can deactivate “Messages” and us “DMs” ONLY. Having two ways of 1:1 chat, additionally to interacting in Topics, sounds a bit over the top for me. Why is there Messages alongside DMs anyway, can we deactivate Messages as we can deactivate Chat and its Integrations?
Thanks for helping me getting the UI of the community Im making clean and less busy…
There are a number of features like moderation, the Discobot tutorial, etc… that rely on messages so chat DMs can’t be used as a full replacement
I agree generally though, it would be nice if chat DMs could function as a full messaging replacement. The existence of two separate messaging concepts feels like a lot for people new to Discourse.
Strongly agreed. I understand that this is probably something that needs quite some work in the background, but from a user perspective, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense that there are two ways to send direct messages, i.e. two implementations of the same concept (public group chat feels fine, though; it’s really just chat DM vs. standard DM that’s a problem).
I don’t find the Discourse UX/UI overwhelming, as I’ve been using it in various places for years before spinning up my own. But I have stakeholders who are concerned about less-internet-native folks finding it confusing.
So I’m trying to simplify the first impression a bit, too – at least initially – by:
Setting the home page as the simple category list, rather than listing Topics.
Suppressing the Tags list from the sidebar. *
Deactivating Chat.
I feel like Messages will have a place for staff discussion—and, as mentioned, the system has features that rely on Messages—but I expect our folks will be very asynchronous and not have much use for Chat.
There’s probably more I could do, but at some point you gotta acknowledge that it’s a complex system, and just encourage people to click around and see what happens. As a friend pointed out: “Everybody learned how to use Facebook, and that’s a total UX cluster%@$%.”
You may want to look in theme as there are a few minimalist themes.
One is even called minimalist.
Pinboard is a very simplified UX. If disabling PMs. You would also want to disable the tutorial and maybe look into the welcome message giving a link or have a basic guide on your site’s interface.
Most of can’t use Facebook. They can read and send, nothing more. They can’t even change order of showed comments.
One small forgotten detail too
Do they need more? Quite often no. And that is the only strength of Facebook — they show only essential ones. And the strongest weaknesses are that fact there isn’t anything more.
The difficultiness (is that even a word) comes from demand to understand markdown and remember lot of different things. Sorry to say this at loud, but sometimes I have a feeling that Discouse is planned from devs to devs.
But I have to say that Discourse is changing to more… john and jane doe -friendly direction.
There is responsibility of admins too. Is it really necessary install all bells and whistles? Are those tricks really to users or are those there just because an admin likes and events are for marketing?
So, it depends. I would do a different forum for knitting than for SEO-marketing and for state-of-the art devs.
And for that we need easy to use ability to hide and show different tools and things based on groups. Some we can already do and others need dev-skills.
Would that make admin’s life easier? Defenetly not, because then there would be hell of settings. But perhaps that is one part of admin’s work?
Should I pinpoint where are difficult parts when we are talking about ordinary facebook level users? Yeah, I should because otherwise this is just another meta BS post. But I’ll wait easy tool to adjust composer toolbox first, because that is the very first issue of easyness of lesser skill end-user
I think much of the problem might be solved if instead of calling them “private messages” we called them “private topics,” because as far as I know, that’s what they actually are. They have the same structure as topics but are not public and are limited to the specific individuals allowed to view them, which can be manually identified individuals or individuals collected into groups.
How do you all imagine a simple name change impacting user understanding?
Cultural and linguistic (BTW, thanks to the team for fixed position issue of AI helper nevermind, I was in mobile view after trying Central theme) question. For me that has been quite strange question because for us finns there is no issues what so ever to understand the difference of chat and private messages. I think it comes from that for us finns a chat and a PM are two totally different things. We use only name chat for… chats. Actually we don’t even has Finnish name for chat and we use its finnished form chatti[1] when private messages are literally translation of that.
And still I may adopt that idea. Just because I’ve teached how my users know when they are answering to a topic and when they are in PM-topic… those two looks so similar. Perhaps too similar? We are still living in the world where an user tried buy something from Google Play and was very irritated because phone was asking pin or biometric and that user didn’t want to give such information to Google
But… are english speakers really uncapable to see differences of chats and PM? Or is it just because an admin wants to use chat instead of PM?
damn that finglish; I kind of understand language politic in France ↩︎
Ohhh, fair, in the interface it just says messages and I didn’t change it. I think I’m the one who implicitly saw them as private messages, probably because I’ve thought about them as private topics for a while. Im even thinking about changing the interface to say private topics.
To be fair, I don’t have many active users so I don’t know if I’ll get much feedback beyond how it feels to me.
You may want to look in theme as there are a few minimalist themes.
Thank you so much! I’ll definitely take another look at the options and see what “Pinboard” has to offer us.
When I was first getting our community off the ground, I decided (brace yourselves, @Jagster and @ToddZ!) that the ‘FakeBook’ theme would be perfect. It has a great level of Feng Shui, and the interface is something my users will be familiar with (or at least know just as well!).
Now, after almost initialising it, I’m starting to think I might have made the wrong choice. I’m not sure I can see any benefit to the theme at the moment. Maybe I just didn’t set it up right? When setting it up, I’m considering to drastically reset my initial enthusiastic feature activations.
I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone for this really insightful and constructive topic so far.
PM Topics are a lot different than messages in that multiple people can be added to those, so they aren’t necessarily private at all and can be read by site administrators unless they are encrypted.
Technically believe they are called “personal” messages not private.
Anyway I agree with overall the default User Interface can be confusing and not good Feng Shui for a front porch is not recommended for that.
Very much agree. Us old school users are more technically inclined. This is where we really need what the plugin dev was aiming to achieve with the basic editor that can be user switched on/off with default being on.
This would be a great collective pool of sponsors.
Agreed. PM or DM would be better as without encrypt plugin installed they are not fully private. Direct chats are not equal. As you can’t divide a pm chat into different seperate topics. With DM you have topic/subject title and you can enable tags for ever greater sorting.
Imho best to avoid private label unless using the encrypt plugin.
Themes are a good place to look over. If you create a topic with an outline with examples. The Discourse Community can assist with recommendations on how you can accomplish different things with existing plugintheme & theme-component .
