Interest in (volunteer) formal UX evaluation of Discourse?

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Hi, I’m a Lecturer in Interaction Design here in Australia and I have a research project that is about ascertaining the value of novice UX research en masse. I would love to use this approach to the Discourse platform if that would be welcome.

Effectively about 100 of my university students would provide their time as “swarm” UX research, which the research team of more experienced designers would then collate into a report for you.

The aim of the research is to see if large numbers of novice UX designers can provide significant value to medium/large projects (like Discourse). Questions are:

  1. Would this be of value to the Discourse community?
  2. We would probably focus on either mobile or desktop, so advice on which would be preferred would be good.
  3. We would need to interview a couple of the core Discourse team in the context of the report to see what the perceived value was.

Any feedback on this idea would be much appreciated.

(Aside from this being useful research, I love the Discourse mission and hope that this project might be helpful in some way to this community)

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This seems interesting to me (I’m one of the designers on the team)!

We’ve made some improvements to mobile over the past 1-2 years, but I suspect there’s more that can be improved, so I’d personally be interested in mobile over desktop.

I’m also happy to be interviewed after reading the report. Feel free to send me a PM here if you need anything else from me.

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Love this idea and hope if it moves forward you can eventually share the final report publicly here, seems like a great learning opportunity, both for highlighting specific things for further discussion, and in general seeing how this “swarm research” type of feedback can work :slight_smile:

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Thanks, great to hear the positive feedback. I’ll go ahead with this, and yes, I will share the report publicly on the forum as well as with the core team. I’ll just have to finish the interviews first so as not to bias results from public reaction.

Also FYI this project will happen slowly because institutional ethics boards take months. I hope to get the whole project done by the end of the year is my time frame.

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