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:
- Using the Welcome Link Banner to highlight a couple of introductory pages.
- 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%@$%.”
* w/custom CSS:
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="tags"] { display: none }