Hi Kris,
thanks for that. I guess the jury is still out whether people want to keep the "quick reply" or not. I am still undecided about it myself. It could still be a few months before the WYSIWYG editor becomes available.

Dear all,

Another nice bit of news is that we have improved the way of making new posts (I mean starting up a new thread): If you want to make a new post in a new thread it is now easier to place it in the correct category. Rather than choosing from a very long pull-down menu you can first navigate to the right category and sub-category. From there, if you click on "post a new topic" your thread will directly be placed in the right location. Great, isn't it?
Please try it out and tell me what you think.

Carol: this was one of the shortcomings that you had pointed out to us!

Regards,
Elisabeth

Regarding quick reply: while it is not really that much needed, it is a bit nicer to use than the old editor. But I guess once you upgrade to the WYSIWYG editor, it can be removed.

Dear Claudia,

Thanks for your feedback!
You're right, the "login to reply" below a post was misleading because it looked like it was clickable but it was not. We have now changed that to make it clearer that it is only a hint: You need to login before you can reply. The login button is at the top middle right. - Is that better?

And I agree with you that the green that is used for hyperlinks on the SuSanA website is too pale. It's been an ongoing discussion behind the scenes for quite a while... It's the "SuSanA green" but it really is not great for hyperlinks. The User Experience study also pointed that out.
So we're working on a SuSanA website revamping (first we did the Forum, now the SuSanA website), and hope to have results visible for everyone by beginning of July. The fonts and colours will be better after that!

All the best,
Elisabeth

Hi Elisabeth,

I like the new layout very much.
I tried it also on my mobile, looks fine, however on the susana.org site I find the green color of the titles too light to properly read it.

On the forum site, the link "login to reply" was not working for me,

best regards,
Claudia

Good news: Based on popular demand, we have changed the way the user details are shown: now the number of posts, likes received, karma points received, website link and location are again visible below the person's profile picture! The green triangle which was used to show or hide this information is gone. Very good.

Finding profile information of another user

Question to Carol and others: what else could be done to make it more obvious that the profile photo as well as the underlined user name are clickable, and that the click takes you to that person's user profile? We are scratching our heads how to make it more obvious. Already the mouse pointer changes when you hover over that. I had the idea to put the user name into a grey box but it would mean one more grey box. Any ideas? How do other Forums do it better than we do it?


Quick reply versus reply under the action button

Dean and Marijn; I hear you about the issue on quick reply versus reply. Is anyone in favor of keeping it? If not, then I guess we better abandon the quick reply. But could we hear from another 3 or more users about this issue so we get a clearer picture?


Carol: thanks so much for your detailed feedback, please continue to report on these things! My answers:

URL inside of the e-mail notification

When you get an e-mail notification of a new post in a thread that you have subscribed to then indeed, the URL doesn't always take you to exactly the right post but might take you to the start of the thread. This seems to be the case for any thread that is longer than one page, i.e. more than 11 replies. It seems to be a bug in the system. In that case, please just go to the last post in that thread and there you'll find the post. I hope the Kunena guys will fix it.


Problems with bullet point lists in the editor

This is a bug with the new Kunena version: setting up bullet point lists doesn't work properly. We hope that the Kunena guys will fix that soon. They are also working on a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor which would also solve this problem. It is supposed to come out in the next few months.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Thank you, Elisabeth,

Your how to feedback is very helpful. I'll keep at it and see if I think these things are sufficiently intuitive for a range of Forum Users. Many of the people replying here are seasoned users. The upgrade has to work for everybody.

Okay here's one thing I do NOT like. I' don't know, however, if it's the Forum architecture, the Forum's automatic email alerts or a personal setting I have chosen. Here's the issue:

1. I received an email with your post. The subject line of the email is (SuSanA Forum] Forum upgrade successful!! What do you think? (Announcements regarding SuSanA) and the name A new reply has been posted on the SuSanA Forum.

2, I wanted to acknowledge your post so I clicked on the link in the email. Sometimes I have 15 seconds to give a thumbs up; sometimes I have something quick to say.

3. The problem? The link took me to the thread. Okay, I see the sense in that: this is an open discussion. But I wanted to give a thumbs up and reply to your post specifically. I had to search for it and that took several clicks.

4. Secondary problem: After choosing quick reply, I had to go to the Editor to put in bullets. But the bullets didn't work. Rather than remove the html, I just deleted and started over.

How can I be more efficient landing on the post I want? Is it me, or the auto email, or the Forum architecture? And is something amiss with the bullets feature?

Thanks,
Carol

I Agree with Marijn on both points. The trend to hide relevant information behind meaningless icons is not a good one. There is nothing "quicker" about quick reply, just limitations the user is not aware of when they click. Then no choice to change to "reply". Gotta go. "Reply" should not be under "Action", but available directly instead of "quick reply"
cheers
Dean

I fully support the removal of the "green triangle". I get the idea of a "clean" look, but those 3 lines are highly informative and don't add any real clutter.

I would also get rid of the Quick reply, and just link to the full editor.

Regards

Marijn

Dear Carol,

Thanks for your post. And yes, we will keep this thread open for another couple of weeks or more. We are always keen to hear feedback from our users and always ready to answer any questions. Your idea of a poll or survey is a good one (e.g. regarding different types of fonts; or regarding whether "quick reply" is helpful for people or not), we'll have a think about that.

Meanwhile, any comments put into this thread will be useful for us to make tweaks and improvements!

About your questions:

Where do I click to see list of all my posts or all the posts of another Forum user?

You need to click on your user profile or the user profile of the other user. Just click on the underlined name which is above the user's photo. Then scrol down a little to the area where it says "recent posts". This shows you the threads that the user has posted in (it is not as convenient as it was in the old Kunena where you could see directly the person's posts; now you see the threads that the person has posted in)


Green triangle could maybe integrate word "More", Strange to have to look two places!

I agree. I think I will try to convince Steffen to do away with that green triangle and have the info on number of posts, likes etc. permanently displayed. If other users were to post here to say that they would also prefer that, then it would be helpful...


Also has the way that I change my profile changed?

Yes, it has changed a little bit, but to the better, I thought? Have you seen the bar at the very top where it says "my profile", and then "edit profile"? The second option is to click on your little picture in a circle towards the top right, on the same line as "post a new topic".


Did this clarify everything? If not, please ask again. If you have suggestions for making it easier/clearer, please don't hesitate to put them forward. Anything that doesn't require drastic changes deep down in the code of Kunena could be done if it improves the user experience.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Elisabeth,

Okay, it's time to see if Preview is a problem or if it's just my imagination.

I choose reply and write. I click "Preview" There appears to be a grey space that resembles a cursor, If I mistakenly try to use it as a cursor, the screen slides out of view. However, it is NOT lost.

Now I choose "Write" to add this sentence. Click "Preview" again. [Very strange, indeed, that I can't see if I've added a double quote (") or a single one (').}

It's OKAY! The Preview problem was my imagination!

How about giving this "What do you think?" discussion another week or so. ( I bet a lot of people are extremely busy right now.) Then perhaps we can write a small survey or poll to make it easier for people to express preferences [within reason, of course] and areas of difficulty.

One area of difficulty for me: Where do I click to see list of all my posts or all the posts of another Forum user?

Other things: Green triangle could maybe integrate word "More", Strange to have to look two places! Also has the way that I change my profile changed? I thought I could do it directly from the Forum without having to go into the website sign up. Again, it's likely just that I'm still not used to the new look. As for the emails being too grey, true! I prefer just going on line after reading the digest email, which is clear.

Thanks for consolidating the issues in your email, EvM.

Carol

Dear Chris and Carol,

Thanks for your feedback! I hope we get lots more feedback - the more we get the better.
Each bit of feedback we discuss here at our end with the team. Sometimes Steffen (our IT guy) points out to me "do you really want to change this based on just one user's feedback?". To which I say "well, there could be more people who think like that, but we are not sure!?".

So please continue to tell us if anything doesn't seem right and we'll see what we can do.

Let me give some interim responses:

The greyness

I wasn't sure what grey Chris meant, so we communicated by e-mail. He meant mainly the e-mail notifications that go out for responses in a thread. It is grey text in a white box on grey. I've asked Steffen if the grey font could be made darker. Another option could be to go back to the text-only format for the e-mail notifications if people prefer that. Again, what does the majority prefer? Another bit of grey is the "last edited by" below a post. Here, I think we could actually remove that information altogether as it is not adding any value, or is it?

The rest of the grey boxes is part of the design features. you don't like it? Please clarify further which parts of the grey are not good?

Quick reply and reply (under "action")

In the old Kunena, there was no difference between quick reply and reply. In the new Kunena there is a difference. Our thinking was that probably Kunena has done lots of market research and has found that some people prefer "quick reply" and some prefer the additional features of "reply", so we have left it as Kunena had set it up (Steffen told me by e-mail: "so we discussed all together how quick reply is useful, and in that overlay directly in front of submit button is good readable notice: "Note: BBcode and smileys are still usable."" ). But if enough people complain about it, we can change it. You find the "reply" under "action" and it gives you added features like the emoticons, formatting and being able to attach files.


Font type

Regarding the font, I fully agree with you, Chris, I also find it quite odd that the comma and fullstop (and also the quotation marks) are so small. Here again we need more user feedback before we make a decision to change (but I have asked Steffen if there is perhaps a similar, but better font).


Information about the users

Information about the users is still there:. Just click on the user's name above their photo to access their profile. Or click on the green triangle below their photo to the left here. I am discussing with Steffen if the green triangle is not intuitive enough. He thinks it should be, but I have my doubts. He didn't want to clutter up the page, hence the idea of making the information about number of posts etc. available only upon clicking on it. - Does anyone have suggestions on making this more intuitive? Do we need a button that says "More about this user"?


Other novel features
Chris: regarding these suggestions:

• New emojis for sanitation topics
• Different options other than "I like this post"

We are not planning to implement those as we're trying to pretty much use only what Kunena has to offer without programming our own additional features, because that can be costly and time consuming. In any case, I can't imagine that the other "short statements" would have much impact, as the person who made the post would not be automatically be notified that another user has made those comments. It's much better if the second user leaves a quick reply to the first user's post. Searchable emojis are also not an existing feature of Kunena. People might as well just use the search function to search for keywords.


Problems with the preview function

Carol: I havn't tried to use the "preview" function yet. That would be annoying if it resulted in a loss of a post!? Could you tell me if that happens consistently? Because if it does then we should turn off the preview feature. (actually I just tried it and had no problems; perhaps you were on an unstable internet connection? I did find a problem with a proper bullet point list though - strange)

Please be assured that we take all feedback very seriously and we have internal discussions about all of them! The more people tell us about stuff, the better it is for us, as it negates the (understandable) reaction of "let's not change it if only one user has complained about it"...

Regards,
Elisabeth

Chris,

I like your post because of the specificity of the recommendations. I agree about the greyness of the new look and that the Quick Reply feature has never made sense.

Is it my imagination or do you lose any post to which you add something after checking it in preview? Yes, I know we should always keep an offline copy until the post appears, but I've lost a couple just by inserting a comma after previewing.

And I absolutely agree about wanting to see what individuals have posted in the past and what their interests and stances on issues are. One of the huge benefits for those of us whose professional communications are largely on line is that this Forum facilitates real personal and professional connections. I want to click on the name of a user and see who he or she is!

Carol