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Overhauling a Forum
The Brief:
Make the forum relevant again to encourage more community amongst a growing sport and become a resource to packrafters all over the world.
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The American Packrafting Association has a forum that 10 years ago was thriving with discussions. Now, it is littered with spam, outdated posts and a broken search function. It is a member's last resort when planning their packrafting trips.
Constraints:
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Development needs to take days not weeks
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Compatible with Discourse (forum platform)
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Scalable for future features
Details:
Client: Joseph Bell, President of APA
Team Members: Scotty Holcomb & Emma Zigarovich
Role: Collaborative UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma
Timeline: Three week sprint
Get Organized
Clean layouts paired with simple information arcitecture created the most usable forums.
Current Information Architecture
Pitfalls in APA:
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'General discussion' subcategory has become the junk drawer; disorganized and topics get lost.
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Some categories overlap with others.
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Big deficit in the amount of topics between categories.
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Only trip reports can be organized by location.
Success in CarTalk Information Architecture
Inspiration from CarTalk:
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Condensed categories make it easy to post and to browse.
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Each category has a clear description of what should be posted.
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Topics can be organized by categories, popularity and most recent.
Discovering Packrafting
User interviews and contextual inquiries brought to light a mountain of issues with the forum and priorities for it's reboot.
Packrafting is not just a sport, it is incredibily important to these people as well as the APA mission of stewardship, education and access.
Inclusivity
We created 2 personas to represent the priorities of Packrafters at different experience levels to:
1. Increase engagement
2. Ensure usability across demographics
3. Prioritize a sense of community between users
4. Aid in developing the relevant categories
The Experienced Packrafter:
Brings knowledge and valuable content to the forum.
The Newbie:
Excited to engage online, find a community and absorb the expertise of others.
How Might We Help Alex and Sam?
New search function has boolean capabilities.
Topics must be categorized so they are not lost in the post abyss.
Focus on Organization
Home Page:
shows all categories, sorted by most recent
Subcategory:
All users interviewed wanted to sort by location
Categories:
Restructured based on client and user interviews
New Topic:
Mirror Discourse format, require category & location
Opportunities to Refine
Complete New Look
• APA attained new branding guidelines for their new website.
• The Forum will use the secondary logo to distinguish itself from the website.
• Minimal design to spotlight the content.
• Categories are color coded with APA brand and badge colors.
Current Forum
• Cluttered and overloaded with information.
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New Forum
• Clear call to actions without distractions.
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Testing on High Fidelity
We were able to perfect organization and add clarity to UI.
Final Information Architecture
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A category and location must be chosen for each topic.
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Users can create their own tags to aid in search and browsing.
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Tags will not disrupt organization.
Added copy to clarify how to sort topics.
Combining Research and Design
Below is the full clickable prototype:
Scalable For The Future
All spec docs have been handed off to the developer, the new forum should be live by March 31st, 2021
We created additional custom features to add to the forum as engagement grows: an embedded map and guides for posting trip reports.
Embedded Map
Final Thoughts: Designing a forum was a great lesson in how important information architecture is to a site. Our client was really receptive when our research showed the users want something slightly different than his original ideas Showing him all of the initial research, and especially the usability testing revealed prioritizing user's needs will result in more engagement.
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One thing I would like to go back to: I want to test the option of some topics being able to sit in two different categories. Only one user pointed this out but he brought up advantages of double categorization.
1. Reducing double posts
2. More people will see the topic if it is in 2 places.