New forum is hard to get to, shows less threads, and feels less informative than previous one
I can't say I'm that impressed by the new look forum.
It was buried in the technical support section:
- Support > Technical Support > More Products > PHPStorm > Community Forum
Strangely, even though it's labeled "Community Forum" it's not in the top level "Support > Community Support" section.
Anyway, now I'm here, the layout is kinda BIG. Clean-looking, but very "Web-Two-Point-Oh".
I'm not a fan of having the post authors below the title, even if it is in grey text; it makes it much harder to scan:
- You'll either want to scan titles, in which case the authors get in the way every line, or
- You'll want to scan authors (probably for yourself) in which case the titles get in the way
Plus, each topic has a line between them, so that's 3 things your brain has to compute, just to scan.
Votes and comments seem to take up a LOT of space as well, but for what reason? They also repeat VOTES and COMMENTS on every line - I can see that; you don't repeat TITLE, AUTHOR or TIME on each line, so why waste the space here?
And what are votes!? It seems that they will only be suitable for some questions, so why use up the space with them? It seems if you get rid of votes here, or at least make it smaller, you can then reduce the massive Comment Lozenge, and make more room. Maybe just show votes WHEN a post has them. Right now a lowly SIX posts have a vote.
Surely the number of times a post has been read is the traditional implicit measurement of relevance as well?
Right now, it feels like the new design is attempting to prove itself, but I don't feel it's doing its job in showing and allowing us users to get to the information we need. I hope that JB is looking to refine the layout over the coming weeks / months.
I know this is the first time I've seen it, and I may well get used to it, but this is a first impression.
Cheers,
Dave
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Please feel free to submit your feedback directly to Mikhail Vink, mikhail.vink@jetbrains.com
Hi Dave,
Thanks a lot for your feedback! We're going to address most of it in upcoming full redesign of JetBrains Community forums (which is currently discussed internally and should be live in a few months). We're going to restructure a lot of forums' parts and introduce many measures to increase information density.
Before that we're also going to introduce some of the much-needed changes to current layouts (and some of the mentioned changes related to information density on the post/comments page are going to be published this week).
Thank you!
Hey Mikhail,
Thanks for the feedback on my feedback!
And thank you for taking it in the way it was intended, which was observational and hopefully came across constructive :)
Obviously redesigning a whole website is a huge undertaking, so I wish you stamina and patience in your endeavours!
Cheers,
Dave
Thanks Dave! :)
Hi! We have released a new layout for the entire help center and community, I believe that a lot of inconveniences have been addressed. We'll be gradually improving the usability of the layout and support some new features as well. Thanks a lot one more time for your feedback!