How about I share what I DON'T do on this site? :)
5yr
@pinkapricorn
I've talked a lot about what features I use on the site and how they could possibly be improved but I haven't talked much about what I DON'T do and WHY. Well since I think this could also potentially help the dev team, I'll share. :)
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When I'm on the forum main page, I click the name of a board or the name of a post. I would click on what's under "last activity" to be taken directly to the latest post on a particular board, but that isn't a link, so I don't do it.
When I'm on a board, I click the title of a post. I would sometimes click what's under "last activity" for a particular thread to be taken to the latest post on it, but it's not a link, so I don't.
I click the big "Categories" button a lot but it's just to get back to the main page of the forum. I don't conceptualize my action as viewing categories. To me this link means something like "Home" or "Main"
I never, ever, never click "latest" or "popular" no matter where I am on the forum because I don't understand how they work and instead of struggling with that my brain found its own way to navigate the forum: picking a board name or post if I'm on the main page and clicking "Categories" if I'm on a board page but wanna get back there to find a new jumping off point.
If I'm in a thread I'll click the "Back" link if I want to go back to its respective board page or "Community" up in the global nav to get back to the forum main page.
I've since become set in my ways of navigating like this and without a compelling reason to learn how "latest" and "popular" works I'll probably never use them.
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Maybe I'm dumb but I don't really understand how the "Browse" section works in the global navigation, so I never use it. I visited it a couple times and I felt overwhelmed by all the stuff I saw and like I didn't know how to take it in. I don't know why I experienced this because I didn't feel this way on the old Proko site. I enjoyed staring at the class offerings even though I've already purchased everything I wanted. Something about it just drew me in. Perhaps the page on the other site gives me a better sense of having a visual order? I know stuff with a strong visual hierarchy I generally feel comforted looking at it. On here I'm confronted with a wall of tiles that are all formatted the same and my brain is like "AHHH!!!!"
Also I wasn't particularly motivated to overcome my feelings and learn to navigate the "browse" section because my account was made on old Proko and I already had courses in my classroom. Maybe if I had nothing I would have felt better about wading through the stuff in Browse. *shrugs* We'll never know. But as it is I just don't like it there.
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I get confused by how clicking "My Classroom" in the global nav and clicking the Proko logo both take me to the same page. For some reason I've developed an aversion to clicking "My Classroom" and always click the logo--despite the fact it takes me to the same place.
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I never go to My Classroom > Album. For some reason it bothers me that every single thing I've posted on the forums went in there despite the fact a lot of what I've posted is screen shots or examples of somebody else's art.
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I keep forgetting that I can see all my courses in My Classroom > Courses and have to remind myself every time how to get there. Sometimes I go to my dashboard and click on one of my active videos to get to a particular course. Because for whatever reason my brain remembers that path better.
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On stuff like 1w, 1m, 8hrs, etc. for how long it's been since something was posted, I don't hover my mouse over it like I do on other sites because it does not give me an exact post date.
For some reason I feel a bit of mental anguish when I do not have a way to access the exact date when something was posted. Like on Reddit I can use the hovering method and on YouTube the post date is plain to see under every video. I have a habit of checking this every single time I watch a video.
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Hope this helps <3
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5yr
@pinkapricorn when it comes to the forum do you think you're stuck in your ways because of how forums operate on other sites? I'm just trying to figure out if the forums are a major problem because of the UI or because people have interacted with so many forums that it's hard to adapt to a different system. Maybe the answer is a bit of both.
That's surprising that you find the menu page on proko more attractive than the thumbnails when it comes to global navigation. The problem with how Proko.com organizes things right now is that it will get messier as we add more courses to the site. Maybe you're used to it right now, but eventually I feel it will get overwhelming. The thumbs are nice way to combat that. I covered "Browse" more in another comment below so I won't go into that here.
Once you're logged in the logo always directs you to the myclassroom page because that becomes a more important page for a logged in user. The home page before you login is really just a splash page for new users and doesn't have use once someone is logged in. I'm not sure it's much of a problem if you prefer to click the logo instead of myclassroom to go to that page. Maybe I'm missing something though.
I've mentioned the albums in a different thread that you can find here - https://prokolab.com/community/topics/i-don-t-like-the-album-section
If that's the course you're working on I could see why you're brain is choosing to use that pathway rather than navigating to the courses and then selecting the lesson within that course that you're on. I think that will change though when more courses start getting added and you'll work on a course that isn't appearing in your feed.
The dates thing is a little tricky for us. One thing that users subconsciously do when they see the full on date of a post is they think it's "old information" that won't apply to them and so they might not take the time to view it. Perhaps having the ability to hover over and see the exact date is a good middle ground solution, but I don't think we'll stamp the dates on each post.
Thanks for continuing to provide all this feedback! We really appreciate it.
||"when it comes to the forum do you think you're stuck in your ways because of how forums operate on other sites? I'm just trying to figure out if the forums are a major problem because of the UI or because people have interacted with so many forums that it's hard to adapt to a different system. Maybe the answer is a bit of both."
@John B I am definitely influenced by having used many forums over the 20 years I've been going online. It's affected my mental concept of what a forum is and what I should expect to find in one. If a forum is going to break convention it needs to do a good job of explaining itself and motivate me to learn a new way of doing things--a tall order!! But I'm sure it's possible.
Do you have the budget to hire a UX consultant to evaluate your site? I've done my best to help with the UX but compared to somebody that does this for a living I'm just a baby in diapers haha What I know consists of book smarts + working on the same site for around 10 years. So I learned a lot but what I still don't know is probably a vast ocean.
8/27/20
I wanted to add an update to this to expand on something I said in the original post:
||"I keep forgetting that I can see all my courses in My Classroom > Courses and have to remind myself every time how to get there. Sometimes I go to my dashboard and click on one of my active videos to get to a particular course. Because for whatever reason my brain remembers that path better."||
I think there's a reason I keep forgetting the path of My Classroom > Courses, I think my brain actively pushes it out of awareness because this path leads me to a place where I see all my courses in tiles and I think it's the same issue with feeling uncomfortable on the "Browse" page. (See original post) My brain feels bombarded with visual stimuli and like it doesn't know how to take in what it's seeing.
I think my brain always wants to travel the path of Dashboard > Resume Learning to get to my courses because in that section, the names of the courses are in bold and it quickly tells my brain what course is what. But when I see the courses in tiles, their titles do not stand out and I think my brain gets really uncomfortable with that. It feels like it has to process everything in each title rather than just jumping from title to title to find what I want.
So maybe it would be overkill to totally rip apart your tile layouts and change them into something entirely different. Perhaps just bringing some emphasis to the titles (larger size and/or heavier font weight) would bring needed clarity :)
If I'm preaching to the choir on this, I apologize, but one thing I've learned from books on the psychology of people when they're interacting with computers, is that any time we view a web page our subconscious brain tries to instantly make sense of it and if it cannot, and we have to consciously consider what is on the page, it feels really uncomfortable because it distracts us from what we were on the page to do. Because working memory is so precious and limited.
With titles that call out to me, "Hey!! This is what I am!!" I can stay in automatic mode.
This is a great idea!
I see what you mean about navigation. Perhaps the developers could change "Browse" to "Shop." Because you can browse just about anything, but shop is more specific to 'this is where you buy courses.'
I perused the forums in the first week or two, but now I just read the social engagement that's tied to the lessons I'm working on. The forums are a bit scattered and random, and I feel like I need to invest time to better understand them ... but I'd rather just spend that time on, say, a loomis head and the specific social posts related to that.
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5yr
@Laura Gingrich @pinkapricorn the problem with "Shop" is that it doesn't encapsulate everything. For non-premium people they won't know that you can watch free lessons from courses. "Explore Courses" is also a problem because we have individual videos that don't feed into a course. If browse doesn't feel inviting enough we'd need another broad word to describe navigating all parts of the site. "Explore" could be good, but to me that sounds a little too click baity to me.
Perhaps asking this in the community could be a good idea if people are not using the browse tab.
@Laura Gingrich Yeah it sounds like you've had a similar experience.
||" Perhaps the developers could change "Browse" to "Shop." Because you can browse just about anything, but shop is more specific to 'this is where you buy courses.'"
Interesting name idea that I hadn't thought of. I think I would feel more comfortable with that name.
And on the topic of naming, it would probably help the dev team to bounce some alternative names off the community and see what creates the right ideas in their head. Like "shop" I think gives me a much better idea of what to expect than "browse." Or if within that term they wanna include both free and premium versions of their courses then maybe something like "Explore courses." It makes me kind of excited to see the world "explore" like "Heck yeah I wanna see what's there!!"
And to add to the thing about our brains not wanting to invest time into figuring out tricky parts of the site, I wanted to say that I haven't fought at all against my brain's natural inclination to do this because I want my usage of this site to be as close to a regular user as possible and most people will be too much in a hurry to really want to study what everything is on this site and how it works. So I just go with the flow created by the interaction of the UX with my brain.
Hmmm *thinks about that last sentence* I like that. I think that really sums up my interaction with every single part of this site. As going with the flow created by the interaction of the UX and my brain.
