These community forums are laid out on screen in a wierd order. I’ve been poking around and clicking on different things and I’m still not sure about the organization of these forums, hence; THEY ARE NOT LAID OUT INTUITIVELY. Any chance you guys (U-tec) could rework these community forums so they are more user friendly and intuitive?
I’ll give you some specific examples of what I find confusing:
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At the top of the page there are two columns, with ‘Post’ over each column. What are these columns? Are the right & left columns different somehow?
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Graphically the ‘U-tec Community’ hyperlink at the top left-hand side of the page is not obviously the ‘Home Page’ link… it’s not bolded, underlined, formed into a button… nothing. It just looks like any other text on the page. Make it obvious that this is the primary navigation link back to the homepage… this is web design 101 guys, come on!
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After I scroll the homepage down a bit, large (Main Category?) icons are revealed, i.e. ‘Release Notes’, ‘Wish Lists’, ‘Integrations’, etc. These seem pretty important and the main way to navigate the various topics & comments… so why are these not front and center, top of the page?
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Below these main category (I assume) topic icons are what appears to be all posts across all topic categories listed chronologically. Now we’re finally getting to what looks like a familiar layout for discussion forums… but what is the ‘Activity’ colum, far right-hand side of screen? The first row shows 41M (I suppose this is views?). But then the next post shows (13h), I assume this means 13 hours since last reply to or view of this post? But then after scrolling down a bit, the dates jump from “Feb 19” to “Nov '21”… the format is slightly different. Is this a mistake in coding or am I to take this to mean that we’ve gone from ‘Feb 19, 2022’ to ‘Nov ?, 2021’. I guess in general my compaint is that this ‘Activity’ field would be better served to be called “Updated” or “Recent” or something. It would also be more intuitive to just list a full date range and not jump around between formats used the further down one scrolls. I would recommend the tried & trusted; ‘MM/DD/YY’ or ‘Mon/DD/YYYY’ or similar. I understand that this point is kind of picky on my part.
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The inidividual posts under a topic have a post number order in relation to total number of posts (pretty cool) and a date, but the date is only MM/DD. I find this a bit confusing because I’m not sure if I’m looking at really new topics/posts from this year, or from previous years. Would help if here again, the date were listed in full format, i.e.; MM/DD/YY or Mon/DD/YYYY or similar.
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I’ve numbered each of these ‘complaint items’ for better understanding, yet when I publish this post, my numbers dissapear. When I go back in to re-edit my post, the numbers are still there… they just don’t appear in my posted post. I’ve tried using the actual bulleted numbers text formatting option and just manually inserting numbers and spacing between paragraphs, neither carry over into how my posted post appears. Why? Please correct this. It really helps organization to be able to have a numbered list. It also helps when people reply to / comment on the post.
I’ll stop here for now. Would like to see the above considered. Maybe I’ve just not spent enough time trying to understand the layout of these forums… but that’s kind of my point. The layout should be instantly recognizable and intuitive, if you’re wanting to attract and grow the largest possible community of posters.
Thanks for reviewing and considering my feedback.