Here’s the Open AI one. It has more clarity and conciseness, following the modern UI patterns.
It looks like a dark version of the graceful theme (?)
I like the sidebar, but we would lose the theme descriptions. I personally do not think there are large differences in usability per se.
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Thank you for your suggestion. What specific problem with the OSD Discourse does your proposal seek to address? You write “more clarity and conciseness” - but where exactly does the OSD Discourse need this? Is it actually a problem that a different UI (or theme?) would solve, or does it need better content and information hierarchy?
@SvenPu Yes, I was talking about better content and information hierarchy. I recently joined the community and I really had to make an effort to find the channels and content. I believe that adopting standard patterns which are usually found in community platforms would make it easier for us to scan, jump between channels, and have meaningful discussions.
The sidebar is a familiar pattern for any community platform if you use Slack or Discord. I think that would make the content more scannable in the first go. For descriptions, Open AI has pinned messages for each specific channel.
It looks like discourse has a sidebar feature, might just be an admin setting:
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I also think that this Discourse would benefit from a cleanup. However, I think this should mostly be achieved by thinking about how content can be better organized and kept relevant, rather than a design update
This Discourse looks like every other discourse and feels rather familiar to me. Enabling the sidebar is worth a consideration, though.
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Greta topic and great suggestions/investigations here. Just chipping in with my two cents as a maintainer of OSD.
I’m unsure whether any core team approval would be needed to activate the sidebar for discourse - I imagine that we could test it out and see what happens. The main thing here being that as core team (maintainer) members have admin privileges one of us would need to commit to monitoring how it works for folks and revert back if it does not. It could also be a case of preference or critical usability infrastructure. Both are valid reasons to test new things but we as designers should always be careful if we’re introducing preference AS usability (which it is not always). So perhaps an trial period test?
I can also ask the core maintainer team for their thoughts.
The other tricky thing here raise through the conversation is the amount of time core members have to structure, maintain and make more usable the information here. We’re all volunteer maintainers so we choose when and how we spend our maintainer time - if the community have a real need for a discourse clean up and better community forum maintenance we can certainly look at investing time in that over other priorities for maintainers. Discussing this on a monthly community call would be wise :)))))
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We (I, in this case, I guess) could turn on the sidebar and see if it works out of the box, immediately, without any immediate problems and without obvious duplication of elements that are part of other UI. If all that applies, we can just leave it turned on.
If the sidebar usage means that e.g. we need to reconfigure anything else, or we have duplicated navigation items etc., I would turn it off again and report the problems here and postpone changes until we have a course of action.
What is the sidebar
The sidebar can contains a lot of things, but the core element it replaces is the categories navigation dropdown (though the screenshots I saw still have the dropdown?)
PRO sidebar is that it seems to be the default for newer discourses
CONTRA sidebar is that we already have a category overview in the left columns of the interface and, in contrast to the sidebar, it contains a beginner-friendly description of what the categories are for.
I personally, do not see a lot to gain from having the sidebar, though I think it is good to go with the standard.
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