Support:UX Ideas 2009

Here's a rough outline of some of the changes I think we could do to the SUMO forums to help improve the experience. I've broken this out into changes for users and changes for contributors.

For more information, contact neilio on IRC.

Users

• Revamp the forum to downplay the thread list and make the key paths for people looking for support more prominent
  • Tenderapp.com does a good job here - see https://help.tenderapp.com/
  • "My issues" (if the user is logged in and has submitted unanswered questions)
  • Ask a question / Search (this should be integrated, ala my original concept for the ask a question search)
• Allow admins / contributors to set certain threads as being "hot issues" (not sure of the right wording here) that are good examples of existing known issues that are getting a lot of traffic/asked repeatedly, and highlight these on the user home page / sidebar.
  • e.g. Say the current Flash plugin is causing a large number of crashes on a certain site - we might want to mark a relevant forum thread as "hot" so people coming to the site specifically for this issue can find the relevant topic on the home page.
  • Similar to how you can "sticky" a topic in a forum - maybe we already have this functionality? (I haven't seen it.)
• Add the ability for users to leave how an issue makes them feel (ala getsatisfaction.com) - this helps the user add emotion to an issue, and can help as a prioritizing filter for contributors (if an issue makes a user feel very angry, for example)
• Users should be able to receive (via email) full text updates of responses to their issue, and be able to respond to these emails from directly in their email client (i.e. if they sign up for email notifications, they don't have to come back to the site to respond if they don't want to).
  • Emails sent by the site will have to make very clear that responses will be posted publicly
• Add ability for users to "star" or otherwise mark a topic - this might help users add a "me too" without having to post a full response
  • This could help with prioritizing issues that multiple users are having

Contributors

• Completely revamp the home page for logged in contributors
  • Display sortable table view of posts, with post title, excerpt, # of responses, mood (see above), last date active, # of stars (see above)
  • Display dashboard summary of current activity (# of active threads with recent posts, # of unread posts since last visit, list of posts assigned to you, etc.)
    • Basically, optimize the forum view for people looking to answer questions, not browse through a chronological list of posts
  • Display "hot issues" (issues that fulfill a criteria as being particularly active and not marked as answered)
  • Allow contributors to "take" ownership of a post (e.g. "I've got this one") and "assign" posts ("I think you can help me with this post")
• Allow contributors to add metadata to a post that is only visible to contributors
  • Give contributors ability to have a "back channel" for a post, to discuss solutions or other commentary with other contributors without having this information posted back to the user
  • Add ability for contributors to mark a post with certain flags: "answered", "troll", "need help", etc.
• Create an "attention" area for contributors, that displays posts that have been flagged as "for your attention" by an other contributor
• Give contributors a private, contributors-only "water cooler" area where they can gather, swap tips/notes, and connect with other contributors - give them their own community as one of the privileges of helping out. T-shirts? Badges?
• Run occasional contests/contributor drives with prizes to help enlist new contributors, raise morale, and increase contributions

Here's a rough wireframe of how the new contributor "dashboard"-style page could look. I didn't include the full content for the tables but this should give you an idea of a direction.

SUMO contributor concept wireframe.