I’ve been onboarding new users onto our Discourse site and taking note of how they are interacting and where they get tripped up.
One big pain point I noticed was that new users easily miss that a preview of their post is being generated to the right of the compose window because it’s completely covered up by the educational / yellow panel.
[Image Description: Screenshot of situation decribed above.]
For people new to markdown, something like 
or
[Write How We Communicate FAQ](https://hub.youthpowercoalition.org/t/write-how-we-communicate-faq/451/2)
especially when copied in from a different text, looks really odd and not intuitively like it would work because the preview isn’t showing. My new user copied something in and then immediately started editing out things like the * in *bolded text* . She never clicked esc in order to dismiss the help text and then discover that the odd characters actually resulted in the post that she wanted.
So, from a UX perspective, I think there should be something that makes it obvious that a preview IS being generated and the help text is dismissable. It’s not obvious enough right now.
Tagging in @tobiaseigen because we started this conversation outside of Meta.
This was Tobias’s initial response
I did not realize that it does not go away by itself because I always immediately use the X to close it. If people do not realize it can be closed and don’t close it, then indeed the composer functionality is going to be super confusing and hard to use. If you could add a reply to How to disable the yellow panels for first two posts? with this feedback, we can work on improving it. One thought I have is to have a close button on the popup, and to disallow typing until it is selected? Or to close it automatically after a little while?
Maybe a little transparency for the panel background?
I would also place (another?) Esc x button on the left side of the panel, the one on the right side, usual location, is really far from the “eye action”
[Image Description: Screenshot from article that shows what I described above]
I wonder about this because I think there are a lot of places that put x’s on the upper right side. What I’d like is for the x and the esc shortcut to be a much darker color and for the x to match that x in a circle icon that I’ve come to expect. See the article above.
Well you’re right, it’s objectively not a big deal, but I can testify that in some rare case where users are really not used to… any ui at all, everything is a mountain on the road to actually write something. The very subtlety of discourse that we all love can be perceived as frightening. I know my case is fringe but I had to convince some of my users to go from pen and paper directly to discourse without passing go! So yes, the panel was a (small) friction.
I think a two parts composer is a concept difficult (relatively of course) enough to apprehended, the panel “murks” a little bit the first impression (by hiding only the part on the right, for a short time, I agree).
Oh yes about that I’ve always thought it was weird that I still see this panel, as an admin, after hundreds of posts and topics, but it never bothered me that much…
but I’ve just checked, the summary says I’ve created -313 messages ! A negative count ?
We’re a small team at the moment and currently redesigning our forum, hence the 1:1 onboarding/user tests, so I’m not worried about our current users.
I think you’re underestimating how big a deal friction is for new users, though, especially for communities that exist only via a forum. Markdown can look very intimidating to people. I’m super tech savvy and I still rely heavily on the preview pane to know that I’m on the right track. People who are scared away from ever posting, well, of course they wouldn’t show up as users who post more than twice.
I changed my mind. I think it’s definitely worth trying if moving the x and esc to the left changes things for users. And, I’ve since noticed it on the left side for a lot more websites than I anticipated.
The other thing you could do is turn this message off entirely; then new users would only see the preview. I believe that’s possible today via existing Discourse site settings.
It’s reasonably clear how to close the panel. But the problem isn’t that the user is trying to close the panel and can’t figure out how. Instead, the user sees no reason to close it because they do not know that there’s anything interesting hiding behind it. Then they get overwhelmed by editing markdown syntax without a preview,
I think this is a potential stumbling block for users who are not familiar with markdown editors, and the first few posts is exactly when the learnability of the user interface matters most.
It’s possible we could do a “just in time” education panel the first time the user sees the editor. But then, that’s the point of this panel… there is already “just in time” education going on here, to educate people about being civil when participating as they begin typing their first reply:
Does your reply impove the conversation in some way?
Be kind to your fellow community members.
Constructive criticism is welcome, but criticize ideas, not people
For more, see our community guidelines. This panel will only appear for your first 2 posts
This is… very, very important advice. Some of the most critical we provide. Now, this advice panel should be skipped if you indicate “Skip the new user stuff” during the initial onboarding, like so – this setting was introduced in Discourse 2.6 in late 2020:
That being said, I don’t feel that typing words, as I am doing here, typically requires much (or any?) formatting, and people are generally comfortable typing words into boxes on the Internet these days, 30+ years in.
(In fact, the main “formatting” in most posts are adding images, which is something average people do on their phones and devices every day; I’d assume the vast majority of the world understands how to do that, by pressing the “add image” button in the toolbar or editor.)
Well, I just came from a newly implemented Discourse site which is replacing two legacy sites. We are still tuning it and one of the first things I stumbled upon was not finding a preview. I mean, every sensible site for posting text has some kind of a preview and I was frantically searching for some button to reveal it. I dare say I’m a seasoned forum user, but it took me minutes to come up with the idea to close the yellow and subsequent blue (similar topics) panels.
We often have users that paste long pieces of code or malformatted URLs. A preview is needed already and especially for first time users. Please treat this as user feedback and not as just some abstruse idea.
An (I guess) easy fix is to just narrow the welcome panel down to 2/3 its width to make the underlying preview pane visible. Then it becomes clear that closing the panel will actually achieve something.
I’ve always thought it was weird that I still see this panel, as an admin, after hundreds of posts and topics, but it never bothered me that much…
A negative count ?
