Problem Space
Online forums are discussion websites where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages (or replies). Although these forums host rich quality of content, it came to our observation that a lot of times these conversations become difficult to track and follow.
Understanding the problem
1. Interruption in discussions:
Most of the forums today advance vertically. One person posts a topic and other people comment on it. The problem arises when two people (or more) start conversing with each other often deviating from the original topic. It becomes difficult for everyone to follow such a conversation.
2. Difficulty in finding specific information:
A considerable number of users visit forums with the aim of finding some key information. Most of the search features employed by online forums today are not powerful enough to help users find the relevant information hidden inside discussion threads.
3. Viewing important replies:
One of the fundamental problems with discussion forums is that the same technology is used to support both 'discursive' and 'authoritative' type of conversation. Discursive conversations are discussions revolving around the exploration of ideas. On the other hand, authoritative conversations focus on finding the right answer. A wide variety of forums focus either of the types but hardly any designs address both of these aspects.
Design Core
The purpose of this design is to provide a better visual hierarchy and easy content discovery.
Design Concept
1. Branching:
‘Sub- threading’ for discussion to the right of the original comment. This solves the problem where a group of people may start conversing to each other often deviating from the original topic.
2. Discussion & Most-liked view:
Discussion view shows all the comments posted by users arranged in time. The oldest replies appear at the top followed by the newest comments to the bottom. As the name suggests, most-liked view shows top 'liked' comments with other comments compressed.
3. Reply:
Users may choose to reply to either the main topic by using the ‘Reply’ button or to an existing comment by clicking the reply icon appearing next to the comment.
Branching the conversation into sub-threads to provide a better visual hierarchy.
The search text box can be used for searching content like keywords, posts by users, files and other programmable custom search options. On doing so, the location of the potential matches is highlighted on the scrollbar below. Users can also click these colored areas to automatically scroll to the location of the match.
Initial Design Ideas
A few design concepts that helped us reach the final design.
Team members: Fuchang Yang, Sophia Nwankwo, Shiyue Sun, Kaustubh Barde.
