Support Forum Preliminary Mockups

The next revision of the support forumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. design is ready, as we get closer to coding, hopefully by next week! In order to move to the next stage, I want to get these mockups in front everyone to gather comments and feedback. These are definitely preliminary mockups; things can and will change, especially during the implementation phase.

If you haven’t followed along before, take a moment and review the Design Research post and the Wireframes post from earlier.

The Homepage

Homepage

Homepage

Mobile view

Mobile view

Homepage Notes

  • Search is prominent in the blue title bar, which follows the design pattern from the new PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party Directory and Get page.
  • 3 columned jump points to various popular documentation destinations.
  • Forums have a grid layout, as seen in the wireframes, but the most recent topic links have been removed. Instead, longer descriptions have been added. The support team can customize these to make it easier to locate the relevant forum and dive into it, without be overwhelmed with text.

Forums page

Forums page

Forums page

Mobile view

Mobile view

Forum View Notes

  • Two columns in the table now use icons instead of text descriptions to minimize their width. This should reduce wrapping of the topic title.

Topic/Discussion page

Discussion page

Discussion page

Mobile view

Mobile view

Discussion page Notes

  • The initial post is given a grey highlight, to separate it from replies.
  • If the post has been resolved, it’s marked as such and the specific answer is noted with a green checkmark.

Search results

Search results page

Search results page

Mobile view

Mobile view

Search Results Notes

  • As of right now, search will be use the built-in bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 2 search, so it will only return forum posts in the results.
  • If the user doesn’t see an answer or post about their question, there’s a button to quickly move this into a form for creating a new discussion.

Feedback

I’d love some some feedback on these mockups! Feedback on anything is great, but in particular I have a couple of questions:

  • Should comments from moderators, authors, and plugin authors have a different style than regular comments?
  • Where should the “All Topics” and “No Replies” links go? Perhaps on the homepage?

Leave your feedback below and let us know what you like and don’t like. 🙂

#design, #forums