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Online Experience (UX)

Drexus
I'm a participant level 3
I'm a participant level 3

As visual communications is my profession, I’d like to offer a few observations if I may.


At the root of the “Fido Community” section, it’s not evident where the forum areas are. After a long time I discovered these areas under the grey “Forums” drop-down menu — at the top of the photo.


From a usability perspective, this is somewhat unintuitive. Users have reached the Forum area, and thus would not expect to reach for the Forum menu. The implication is such that the menu looks like a button — offering you to go where you already are. The suggestion isn’t implied by this alone, for the location of the dropdown is too close to the area reserved for site-wide navigation (verses content specific navigation).


To remedy this: Move the menu bar below the photo, give the menu bar a larger presence (not grey), and change Forums to “Forum Areas”. I understand the idea of creating distinction of Forums verses Fido Community, however online culture has long since adopted “Forums” as the parent area of any forum section. To that, you can call it Fido Community Forums if you like — saving the confusion of Fido’s community without a forum.


Lastly, there is no other reference to forum areas on the forum landing page. So visitors feel uncertain as to where to go when they land there — left floating.


One other thing, due to the nature of the code in the forum tool, client-side spell check isn’t possible when they type, which forces them to use a desktop writing application. When they copy and paste, double returns that manually delineate a paragraph get stripped out. Only one return survives the paste function — thus, composition requires 3 returns to establish a break.

 

OK, last one… Is there a setting that can disable the hyphens? This is an online platform — no paper being used. Unnecessarily breaking words with a hyphen is a strike against readability. Scrolling is natural and expected.

 

Thanks.

 

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