4 Steps to Designing Good Forums

Forums are as old as the Internet. Before Social Media, Forums and IRC are what brought people together in the virtual space. Forums were more pervasive in nature, did not require immediate action and the all the information was searchable — which made them a good fit for likeminded individuals to share information and experience and connect.

Often, discussion boards users build and foster identities and used them to connect and form relationships.

But in the world of Social Media, remote teams and collaborative tools, where do forums fit and how can they complement other tools to bring distinct value?

— -> change it to answer the question of value

First off, here is when you should consider having a Forum:

A Forum is about user engagement and how fast people can get to relevant information with as little pain as possible. Here are four steps to achieving both:

1. Build Empathy for Your Users: design for social change and foster power users and influencers.

2. Make Things Easy to Find — Allow the user to recognize elements of interest. Build good navigation, with consideration for the hierarchy of the knowledge base.

3. Make Things Easy to Search — If the users can’t recognize elements of interest right off the bat, build robust search options. Your goal is to make the user’s journey from point A to point B fast and painless.

4. Simplify and Iterate! — Empathize, shave the unnecessary, test, reiterate. Repeat.

Think of it as you would design a children’s park: First, you would want to know who uses the rides: is it for public use, is it for a kindergarten, who comes there, who stops where, when and why, etc. Then you would want to design the rides accordingly, to foster the adult-child relationship or focus on collaborative activities between children. It’s the same with a Forum: Define your users, define the behaviors you want to encourage and then design accordingly. Your ultimate goal is to trigger a sense of responsibility for sharing information or using it and because every community is different, a subtle individualization can make for a highly engaged discussion board.

Focus the objectives of your research on behaviors, not who the users are:

Most likely, you will get a wealth of information from your study. Focus the findings around behavioral nodes or build a user journey map. While I was doing a similar study on online communities, I used MindNote to visualize the primary behavioral changes around the research objectives. Here is a small section of the Mind Map that resulted:

One word of advice: rather than asking users how they use the forum, observe them. Because a community involves a lot of value constructs, your users will likely answer with what they would rather see as fit than what they would actually do. Ethnographic tools can be very helpful but don’t forget to triangulate methods to make sure your study is reliable.

Having power users and influencers is crucial for a forum — but they need to be incentivized and empowered, sometimes in different ways than regular users.

Some brief highlights from my study showed that:

The chance of users finding what they need improves as the volume of information decreases. If I lose my keys in the house, it is more likely for me to find them in a smaller house or if I can narrow the search area to the kitchen, for example.

Users find things by name or symbols that they recognize. To make things easy to find, you need to build good navigation, with consideration for the hierarchy of the knowledge base and make use of graphical cues and symbols.

One of the wheels that do not need reinventing is that a forum needs shortcuts, most popular being to the most recent discussions or the most popular ones.

Here’s some shortcuts to consider:

I don’t remember life before hashtags. What a fun way to virtualize labels! Make use of hashtags but don’t leave the responsibility of using them only to the user. Showcase hashtags wisely, preferably within a widget that continuously updates the list and pushes the most popular ones on top.

Improving recognition is paramount for users trying to find information. That’s why it’s good to use symbols, colors or any other graphical elements that help them scan and pick up signals from the noise. While doing that, remember to check your design choices with the user profile.

Categories, sections, forums, topics, call them as you like but make sure you pivot into pre-existing mental models and the name itself does not add to the cognitive load of the user. It’s easier to understand and remember the hierarchy between “Topics” and “Sub-topics” than between “Sections” and “Forums”.

Be very selective about your main topics and test them with your users. Do they think those topics would virtually cover all possible discussions? Do they believe that some might be redundant? As you branch out, you may allow for more elements on the same hierarchical level.

Preferably each with a drop-down menu for the sub-topics. Be aware of the relationships between the main topic, a sub-topic and the threads under each sub-topic and make the hierarchy as transparent as possible to the user.

Don’t try to create too many categories and sub-categories, hoping that threads will not overlap. There’s a balance between too many categories and usability. You would rather have overlapping threads than having 154 sub-topics. And, knowing that, you can take measures to offset the overlapping of topics.

With a large knowledge base, it is impossible to avoid overlapping threads. You might have a discussion among users that relates to two sub-categories or even two or more main categories at once. The first step to offsetting this is to acknowledge it and be comfortable with the mess that comes with any discussion board. It’s okay to be so and trying to constrain people into posting to different categories will chase them away.

Instead, think of the negative effect of the overlapping: it makes it hard for people to search information of interest. That’s why it’s important to put a lot of thought into the filtering system and the overall searchability of the forum.

Searching works best when there is a large pool of data to probe. If I am searching for places to eat in a city, I am more likely to find more of them in a bigger city. Your job is to help me find them as fast as possible.

People search information by problem or by cues, generally, what they recall as being associated to what they need. To make information easy to search, you need to build robust search functions.

Building good search functions is a topic thoroughly researched, and it should always convey the fastest route a user can take between wanting to search for something and getting the result they want.

Having a sophisticated search function is a decision at the crossroad of user needs and design principles and should be the subject of user testing. The decisions revolve around the search options and how many should be made available, the white space, the grouping, and the UI but the panel should always:

Generally, search results can be shown as a list or as a grid, with or without a thumbnail or a headline. It’s important to look back at the user profile and consider the best alternative that will make the scanning of results faster and relevant to them.

Always consider adding relevant sorting options for the results obtained and allow consecutive sorting. For example, if the user sorts results by date and then sorts them by topic, the results should be grouped by topic, in their chronological order.

Most likely, the users have two main needs from your forum:

After you went through the whole design process, go back to the board, browse the design and mark all the elements that you feel they do not add value to these goals. Let me give you an example. If you’ve been the member of a forum, you might have seen the lines of information that follow the user’s photo on their posts. In a recent usability evaluation we ran with our consultancy, we revealed that people were either indifferent to it or outright against it. Our users did not know what “Karma” stands for and they would have loved to see other relevant information there, like what kind of position the person has.

Then test, redesign, test again, engage with the users, be part of the community and be nimble to change.

There are wealth of good resources to help you design and build an excellent forum. But the most successful discussion boards out there are, in fact, relying on members’ engagement and their generosity to share information and take part in the community life. Thus, UX guidelines like the ones above should always be used for the purpose of scaffolding community engagement and user goals.

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