The Project
Project Type
UX/UI Design
2 Weeks
Team
Celia Grundman
Prashanth Narayanan
Karima Yulia
Role
Ideator, Interviewer, Researcher,
Wireframer
Although many popular Internet communication services such as websites, social networks, and e-mail have evolved in order to meet modern demands, forums have yet to evolve from its original design significantly. Forums remain popular despite their original linear text-based design of original post/question and subsequent comments/answers. Forums remain active because they serve a purpose in online communities yet their implementation is far from perfect. These problems include difficulties with catching up on a threads content as well as a lack of insightful and meaningful conversations.
Our goal was to modernize forums to correct there current issues and design a new forum for a user group of our choosing.
The Approach
STEP ONE - UNDERSTANDING THE CORE ISSUES WITH FORUMS
- Catching Up - If a participant joins a thread after some time it has started, it is rather difficult for the new person to catch up with an ongoing conversation (especially if the thread has a large number of comments)
- Unaesthetic Design - Forums are mainly comprised of textual contents that often appear cluttered along many pages. Their design is plain and boring.
- Lack of Depth - Users tend to engage in rather short question-answer type of conversations which do not allow insightful and meaningful conversations.
- Cognitive Processing - Because forums mainly rely on textual communication, users need to feel motivated in order understand what is being communicated. If participants are not motivated to process the textual information cognitively, that information can simply carry no meaning.
STEP TWO - Adding Constraints
- Picking a User Group - We set our focus on Museum Professionals - museum curators, directors, artists, and historians. This small community has specializations within their professional realm that requires input from others to have a holistic understanding of their task at hand.
- Platform Selection - We decided to focus on the desktop version of the website only.
STEP THREE - UNDERSTANDING THE USErs' needs
- Connection is Important - Staying connected to other museum professionals is a challenge especially for those who work in remote areas.
- Deep Subject Matter - There is great variety in the subject matter that museum professionals deal with that requires the expertise of others to be successful.
- Sourcing Information - Museum professionals rely heavily on the internet. They utilize small Facebook groups comprised of qualified professionals with specializations in their field.
Concepting different forums to address the needs of museum professionals.
STEP FOUR - DECIDING ON A CORE
Creating a forum to facilitate a high-level knowledge exchange between qualified museum professionals with individual areas of expertise.
The Design
the Enrollment process
In order to have questions targeted to users with a specific knowledge base, an enrollment process was necessary.
Members are self categorized by their:
- Profession - Artist, curator, museum technician, conservator, and researcher.
- Areas of Experience - Mediums, movements, and professional practices
As this discipline involves many sub-specialties, a textbox was introduced to help filter the numerous areas of expertise.
The Homepage
As a learning community benefits equally in sharing knowledge as it does receiving it, the homepage directs the flow of knowledge from user to user.
From the homepage a user can:
- Post a new question
- Explore others’ questions to answer based on their expertise
- Be notified of new answers to their existing questions
- View the most active questions on the site.
- Search to find existing threads that may already hold the answers they are looking for.
posting questions
In posting a question the user has the ability to:
- Specify their audience to target a more qualified user base. The user may target a single, few, or all professions as well as target a subset of users based on the expertise they select through tags.
For example if the user selects a curator and enters the tag “exhibitions” only curators with experience in exhibitions will receive notice of this post. - Understand their questions reach as the target group is specified the user can see how many people fit this description allowing them to evaluate if their request is too specific.
- Create a short abstract that will display in their target users' dashboard
- Add attachments to allow for users to easily reference media (image or video)
ENGAGING WITH QUESTIONS
The left side displays:
- Information about the poster
- The long form of the question and attached media
- A textbox to respond
The right side:
- Displays responses based on professions
- Sorts responses by “most recent” and “highest rated”
- The ability to upvote an answer to show inter-discipline support
- The ability to start a sub-thread
Iteration: Considering Site Navigation
In our initial design, the user could only discover new content was by going to the “Most Discussed” section in the dashboard or by using the search field in the navigation bar. This was done to limit the exchange of knowledge to those who were most qualified to answer the question however, this bothered our users. We decided our design more transparent and give universal access to the users by allowing them to browse through the content regardless of the screen they were in. We developed twelve iterations based on these principles and chose the following design based on user feedback.
