Feng Shui (Simplifying the UI for new users)

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 }

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