Forums

Team: Sanket Shukl, Lillian Hopsons, Annarose Grivin, Ruby Hong.

Responsibilities: Facilitating, sketching, personas, wireframing.

Duration: 2 weeks.

Type: Graduate course project under Marty Siegel.

Is the thread and sub-thread design of online forums, that have been around since a long time, really the best design? It is said that we should not try to fix what is not broken. But on second thought, actually we need to!

Online forums have the same basic design as they did when they started being used in the 80’s. Basically, they have maintained the same thread-based design of an initial post and subsequent comments, and yet continue being very popular among users. Assuming we were professionally hired by a company called interactionDELIGHT.inc (iD) who was asked by Facebook to rethink the way we interact with forums, we took the challenge head on.

Insights:

• Sharing stories and experiences was important

• Empathy was a driving factor

• Ability to be used as a substitute for physical AA meetings (Coffee cups as symbols)

• Being anonymous would help share fearlessly

• More the number of people in a conversation, less the empathy and seriousness.

We interviewed two recovering alcoholics (aged 24 and 40) and one alcohol and drug therapist (for more information about what questions we asked see appendix). In addition,we read posts of people explaining why they used this alcoholic forum online and surveyed the types of conversations help online.

As part of surprise curve balls, the teams were changed when we were halfway through our design process. It was a challenge to incorporate a new team member and to catch them upto speed.

Changing a team member was a rough transition. We had one member on our team swapped with one member on another team. Since I was the facilitator for the project, I learnt a lot about how to keep the team dynamics going in tough situations. I made sure that the new member was on board and her voice was heard in every decision. But working together, we made progress despite the constructive debate, and I learnt that the best way to inch forward is to start sketching ideas collaboratively.

Once we got together as a team, we started sketching our ideas and concepts. This was a rapid sketching session and every team member had 2 minutes to sketch their idea/ concept. Once we had more than a dozen sketches we stopped and discussed each sketch. Borrowing good concepts from every sketch, we composed a final design and showed it around the studio for feedback and critiques.

Final Sketch:

Landing page:

The main landing page for the forum consists of the following design elements:

• Search bar: It gets difficult to find a particular post as the forum grows and gets populated by various topics daily. To simplify searching for a post, there is dedicated search bar consistent on all the pages for this forum.
• Description line: The line right below the search bar motivates the user by informing how many live chats and members are active right now. To avoid backfiring when there is no one active, the description line will disappear.
• Live chats: These are the chats rooms that are currently active. The user can join this chat room and view all the conversation, or participate in the conversation.
• Archives: These are the chat that were once active but now are closed. The cards in this section show the incited texts from that conversation when it was active.

From the landing page, user can click on the live chats button up top to enter a fullscreen live chats cards layout.

Live chats: 

These are the chats rooms that are currently active. The user can join this chat room and view all the conversation, or participate in the conversation. Once the chat room exceeds four users, it does not appear under open live chats any further.

• Topic: This area describes the topic of conversation. It can be an image or text that tells more about what is being discussed in the chat room.
• Insights: While in a conversation the user can hit the star button (explained in the later screens) to insight a particular text and that shows up under the "insights" column anonymously.

Archives Screen:

Just like live chats, the archives screen consists of all the topics that are currently not active. The user can still browse through these topics and read all the insights by clicking on the card she/ he wants to read.

Standard Chat screen:

The chat screen interface is like standard messaging bubble design that shows the coffee avatar of the users in the live chat to the left. The users can customise their own coffee avatar to their liking. On clicking the chat box, the star option pops up for the user to mark that text as an insight. The text marked as insights is reflected under the insights column for marked text.

The user can open multiple chats as tabs and easily navigate in this multitasking mode.

Create new conversation:

To start a new topic or conversation, the registered users can visit the new conversation screen and fill in the topic, description and other details.

The person starting the conversation can decide how many people can participate in that live chat room. Our research indicated that smaller groups leads to intimate conversation. But we decided to give the user the freedom to decide.

With anonymity level the user also has the option to customize whether the starred insights from the conversation will published publically in the archive or whether they are kept private (only viewable by the users involved in that particular conversation).

Reinitiate conversation:

The user can also decide to reinitiate a closed chat room from the archives section. The screen for reinitiating the conversation will show the user the topic, and description with an option to start the chat room again. The insights from the previous instance will remain visible to all the participants anonymously so that they can build on the previous conversation.