Title says it all.
The UI is a nightmare.
Having to look at the bottom of the window to reply, or expand the window to take up the whole screen is disastrous. Honestly, every time I come across a community that uses Discourse I feel tightness in my chest.
For the love of god, do some UX research. This is atrocious. This was a solved problem in pretty much every other forum software, but yet Discourse had to do it different, and in the most careless way possible.
Case and point: I clicked on the reply but look where the reply window popped up!
Did it pop up where I clicked? No. Did it pop up in-line, where the reply would go, like every WYSIWYG editor for the last 40 years? No. It pops up at the bottom… in a tiny window… with another pop-up blocking the text box.
Can I un-dock this window, and make it float over the content and move it to somewhere more comfortable? No. I’m stuck with this cramped layout.
What if I expand it? Great, I can make it bigger, but still docked at the bottom, wasting space that I could be using to refer to other posts in my reply.
Or, I could make it full screen and lose all context entirely!
It really leaves me wondering if anyone actually thought this through at all.
This is truly horrible UI/UX.
Or you could write a polite feature request in Contribute > Feature . We can do this amicably.
(Additional note: there has been a composer redesign here that’s in beta: Help Us Test the Composer Redesign)
I feel literal tightness in my chest when I use your software. If I could avoid it altogether I would.
I’m direct and I’ve left my feedback. Now I’m going to leave, because I want to interact with this software as little as possible, and I unfortunately need to interact with it a bit more on a different site that chose to use Discourse.
It’s up to the people at Discourse to decided if they want to do something about it, or ignore me for being direct. It depends on what their goals are.
If they want me to elaborate, I’ll be more than glad to help. I’ve already offered some suggestions on how it could be better and I’m willing to offer more.
What I’m not going to do is worry about messaging so I don’t bruise egos by being direct.
I’m not being mean, and I’m not being unfair with my feedback. If that’s not enough, I’m sorry, that’s all I can offer at this point.
No dog in this fight beyond reading a first time poster pull out a flamethrower with “direct feedback” and then double down.
Something about catching more flies with honey. Life is full of choices, if you don’t like the software, choose something else.
I have found this software easy to use, with a great development community that is welcoming and supportive.
Your post is a great example of how not to behave in an online community.
I’m not going to apologize for being direct.
I don’t make the choice though.
I’m stuck with other people’s decisions, and unfortunately a lot of people are choosing Discourse.
