Hi
We would like to share something we have worked on for a few months.
We run a startup where companies can post challenges which a community can post ideas to on how to solve them.
It is essentially a way to crowdsource corporate innovation.
For us to do that, we needed a platform which could handle this type of community input. After lengthy testing, we decided on Discourse.
We wanted our UX to be as simple as possible, with tiles representing challenges.
And we wanted to be able to run on a Discourse hosted site which meant pure CSS and Javascript changes – no backend changes as we would then no longer be on fully supported Discourse versions.
This is what our front page looks like:
Each tile is a challenge. It has meta-data like expiration date (with count-down timer), prize (which members of the community can win for the best idea) etc. And it shows the last few ideas under each challenge.
Clicking a challenge takes you to this view:
Further down the page you can see the ideas which have been posted for this challenge:
Clicking an idea takes you one step further down:
We re-styled the comments as a chat-like interface.
The editor is the same as on Discourse, but slightly re-styled:
We also re-styled things like the login page, profile page etc. Example here:
Finally, we made the entire site mobile friendly (fully responsive design). We do not make use of Discourse’s ability to present a different page to mobile users – instead we load the same page for everyone. On an iPhone it looks like this:
For those interested:
- We started work on the 1st of March 2016 with a team of 4.
- A full time UX / UI designer has made the graphics / layout and navigation.
- On June 1st we launched a private beta with 100 participants (community) and 10 companies (with 10 challenges).
Right now we are reacting to the feedback we got, and expanding the feature set (as well as developing native mobile applications on Android and iOS – more on that in a different post).
We would be happy to hear your feedback on how we can improve this rather drastic UI change of Discourse, and are also happy to help others who may wish to go a similar route.
Feel free to reach out.