Information Overload - Some insight through qualitative interviews

UX
21

Not so convenient for mobile. Or if you use multiple computers.

22

I believe you are referring to

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23

Ok this change is live hope it helps with the mobile homepage perception of being “overwhelming”

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24

The inclusion of avatars makes Discourse [mobile] feel much more personal, which is fantastic
 in the right instance. I wish it was an option though. Can it be an option?

With avatars there’s a significant mood change or “feel” to the forum, taking Discourse from a more professional feel to more personal feel. More personal works for some, but there are instances — especially for businesses — where more professional is appropriate and more intimate/personal is not.

There are also significant performance costs for all the extra images on mobile, as @codinghorror mentioned. And for those of us who live in lands of poor Internet, or who have significant user bases in lands of poor Internet, the difference between loading an extra image per user on mobile is significant. Performance was a valid-enough reason for no avatars before so has the performance costs of avatars decreased in any way? Or is the performance cost no longer a valid argument because someone has decided that avatars are a good idea on mobile?

Finally fallback avatars are less effective and more confusing: avatars lose a lot of their personality and effectiveness when users haven’t or don’t upload a personal avatar, which is especially relevant for new instances of Discourse and the reason @HerrHoltz started this topic — because “Discourse is initially too confusing”. Inexperienced new users rarely grasp what fallback avatars actually represent. Most inexperienced new users believe the letter in the fallback avatar refers to a category or topic or something of that nature, so when there are just a whole bunch of fallback avatars and no photos this new topics list for mobile simply adds more information that needs to be processed; much more information that needs to be processed. Can anyone can post a screenshot/mock of the new “with avatars” mobile view where only fallback avatars exist (and no photos) because if you look at that through the eyes of a new user you’ll see how much more information that loads on them.

Overall I love this new change and believe it’s brings much value to Discourse
 but only in the right instance.

25

I’ll add to the conversation as a Discourse User and a Leader-Moderator of a group.

I always ~despised~ avatars. Gmail just added those to personal mail and I hate it. HOWEVER, when I recently lost the Letter Avatars on Discourse, I found the text “pile” with blank jpg boxes very confusing. I had only been using D for 3 months, but Discourse avatars had imprinted its Letter avatars on my brain. LOL The posters were not “dressed” without their letters; who was speaking was visually confusing. If on mobile for Discourse, I must regretfully admit (since I hate avatars) that I would not like Discourse without the generic avatars. However, they could be smaller even on a desktop-laptop.

I don’t control the Main Topic Tree (for primary topics) on my group and have not seen the Admin area to know what is possible. But nearly everyone wishes the tree system was ‘better’. I don’t know if that’s just our Admins not setting it up well, or if it is a D limitation. Users want an expandable collapsing topic tree. As our group grows, so do the topics ‘below the fold’. Wish a section for Archives was built in.

As to the front page appearance, our group has user stats on the right. I think that presentation could be much narrower. It’s too much info for daily consumption. It would highlight topics more if it was narrower/less info. The “user” icon area there gets far too wide when 10 people contribute to a topic. Wish the icons were much, much smaller.

Discourse forces an intuitive user approach, e.g. A user must know to hover over a symbol to know what the symbol does. Unfortunately, many people are NOT very intuitive. They want (neon) text signs and to be led through how to use a Forum. But within a couple months, it is old hat.

For users not familiar with using Tweet # or Discourse @ it can be challenging to include @ when wanting to address a specific person. I do like the User List drop-down after inserting @ 
without it, I’d be out of luck (@
 hmm
 who??).

@HerrHoltz one way our users get around the lack of images / the plain white is when users reach the level of posting images. Perhaps you could post some picture occasionally that is visually appealing for your topic/Forum
 like a Juicer or whatever? And encourage some users to do the same? Also, Forums often need interactive topics
 asking for opinions, a games, or challenges. People learn the forum by using it
 interactive topics encourages them to use it.

Otherwise, I like most of Discourse’s features. Like I said, I just wish for a better tree to put topics into (like a drop down to see the posts)
 so there isn’t everything and the kitchen sink on the front page. It also makes it harder to find old posts (
 just what was the term that person used 3 months ago so I can find it via search today?? )

26

I have to agree with the entire “information overload” or “wall of text” or however it should be described. This is the biggest stumbling block for me. Experienced users already know what they are seeing, and where to look for what is important to them. But new users are simply confused by all the detail. There is no clear site structure organization. There are no aids to help develop a mental model of the site. It appears like someone is already deep inside of some place with no navigational aids.

Latest “what”? New Topic “for what”? When clicking on something, what will happen? Menus are hidden (the fault of bootstrap) and there is search (magnifying glass icon), but “for what”? What do the numbers indicate? What do the colors indicate? Essentially it is very difficult to get oriented initially, and everything has to be guessed at. Basically there is a steep learning curve for understanding how to navigate, and what information is present on the site.

I think focusing on the concept of “learnability” and the formation of useful/accurate “mental models” of Discourse would go a long way toward understanding how to measure improvements of the home page for first time users.

Also, additional visual cues for things like # of responses to a post. I like the icons but people who don’t shouldn’t have to see them.

It may just be that an initial on-boarding process, such as walking through user account creation/modification and the initial email/message that is sent should be presented. But also, to start with, there could be organizational goals presented as “why you are here and we need you to use this, give it a try”.

Beyond that, customizing the home page for the experienced user, while something simpler and more “guide-like” interface for the new user.

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27

I don’t think it will be enough. I’m always amazed by how easily people forget such information. Users are often impatient and skip the intro, and even when they don’t they forget much of it after 10 minutes.

This seems easily fixable: a change of the title to “latest topics” would help imho. “New topic” is imho clear enough, but how about, for example, “New conversation”?

Agree. Here’s my small contribution:

The messages icon can change the color and shape depending on unread messages: (I guess it could be a grey comments-o icon for no unread messages and a blue comments icon when there are)

1 Like
28

A few notes from my mobile use:

  1. I really miss the username of the last poster, if we are suppressing it out of the box it should be done in CSS to make it very easy to enable without fully overriding templates.

  2. Alignment feels off

  • excerpt is too narrow should take full width imo
  • title is too narrow feels like there is too much white space between it and the number
  • avatar is 5px to far to the right
  • pinned / closed icons take up 2 lines
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29

Just pushed a change to use the avatar to the “last poster” instead of the “topic creator”.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/bde4bc52d75e54e05138ade52e371cd12fdd3d2c

Also, removed the 5px margin on the avatar :wink:

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30

For pinned topics I wouldn’t show the avatar and use the full width for the text.

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31

I found the “last poster” avatar change to be really confusing because we’re trained to associate the main avatar with the content “creator” or “sharer” in almost every other application (Facebook, Twitter etc).

Furthermore, when a user happens to reply to a number of topics in succession, his avatar will occupy a large portion of the topic list making it seem like there is a lack of activity on the forum.

Screenshot_2015-10-31-22-32-21.png720×1280 136 KB

It looks like Jeff created those 3 topics no matter how I look at it. :kissing_heart:

:thought_balloon:

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32

I think it is unavoidable, unless we show both the avatar of the topic creator as well as the last poster – which would be very busy – we have to pick either

  1. Topic creator
  2. Last poster

I think creator is more problematic because it will stay the same forever, even if there are hundreds of replies over a period of a week it would always be the same avatar displaying.

So I agree with @sam on this one it has to be last poster. Last poster is more dynamic and more interesting over time.

1 Like
33

We got to fix the bugginess though it is showing the wrong avatar in quite a few spots

@zogstrip confirmed the bug
 If the OP made the last reply and there are more than 1 participants in the topic we show the wrong avatar.

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Fixed per:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/0d15dbd88698304d4fec17b1dc32fb3948a17221

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35

I was under the impression that @sam only wanted the last poster username back or at least make it easy to enable with custom CSS instead of changing the avatar to the last poster. :sweat_smile:

36

Sort of, if I have to choose only one I prefer to see last poster, my personal pref is avatar of creator + username of last poster

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37

Currently we have just the last poster on mobile, seeing it as avatar or text don’t cut any information. I prefer avatar BTW, and the last poster. I check always it also in desktop view

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Well
 we could do a pie chart :wink: (left half being the first poster, right, last two)

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39

I’d personally choose the reverse: avatar of last poster + username of creator.

40

I kind of like the piechart idea. :slight_smile: Or how about showing the OP avatar big and the last poster avatar smaller and toward the bottom right, like a moon orbiting a planet?