Navigation of Connect

[Marc van Grieken]

I am really pleased to have joined  Connect and hope that many many more will join!

But (there is always one) the navigation is not immediately obvious and in fact a bit complicated.  Looking at the opening page: the items that stand out (menu) are those in the green ribbons and not the more important ones hidden top right,  barely visible against the background.  A bit of tweaking of the website design would help if we are serious and use this platform as much as possible.  Lets try to make this as intuitive as possible, if not we will lose interest in this platform.

@Louis Varley please can you help @Antonella Adamus

[Louis Varley]

15 minutes ago, Marc van Grieken said:

I am really pleased to have joined  Connect and hope that many many more will join!

But (there is always one) the navigation is not immediately obvious and in fact a bit complicated.  Looking at the opening page: the items that stand out (menu) are those in the green ribbons and not the more important ones hidden top right,  barely visible against the background.  A bit of tweaking of the website design would help if we are serious and use this platform as much as possible.  Lets try to make this as intuitive as possible, if not we will lose interest in this platform.

@Louis Varley please can you help @Antonella Adamus

Hi Marc, i've made a change to the style to give the toolbar a background color on both light and dark modes to help it contrast. Let me know if that helps solve the issue 🙂

 

You might need to do a full refresh to get the new style to load. (Hold Ctrl and then hit refresh in chomr, or hold shift and refresh in firefox)

normal refresh wont reload it until the cache expires

[Antonella Adamus]

I like the new style @Louis Varley. Thank you for looking into this so promptly!

 

[Marc van Grieken]

I am afraid that since your  @Antonella Adamus very helpful training session (CPD ??) more questions came into focus. @ Louis Varley. The interface is all but intuitive and the menu items are in my opinion not in the right place or of equal weighting.

For example it would be normal on a site like this to have a 'settings' menu and under that would sit a sub menu: in this case 'notification options- 'mode' (light/dark) customiser etc are all settings 

May I suggest that the opening page should lead one intuitively to the bit you want to be:

 

Personally i would 

Simplify the photo or leave this out all together.  

Move LI logo to top Right

top Left  say: welcome to connect and then a listing  (not necessarily this list ) 

• Forum
• Club
• Topic
• Who's who
• settings
• tutorial

Then, as one hovers over , for example Forums it might bring up a pop up explaining in very few words what it is.  

Then when you click on Forums, this should take you to forums but it does not do that at present (well it does but only if you scoll down past Clubs.)  (incidentally, you should also be able to set which forums you want to have visible to you..) is it worthwhile to discuss this in more detail.  

[Louis Varley]

On 9/3/2021 at 9:59 PM, Marc van Grieken said:

I am afraid that since your  @Antonella Adamus very helpful training session (CPD ??) more questions came into focus. @ Louis Varley. The interface is all but intuitive and the menu items are in my opinion not in the right place or of equal weighting.

For example it would be normal on a site like this to have a 'settings' menu and under that would sit a sub menu: in this case 'notification options- 'mode' (light/dark) customiser etc are all settings 

May I suggest that the opening page should lead one intuitively to the bit you want to be:

 

Personally i would 

Simplify the photo or leave this out all together.  

Move LI logo to top Right

top Left  say: welcome to connect and then a listing  (not necessarily this list ) 

• Forum
• Club
• Topic
• Who's who
• settings
• tutorial

Then, as one hovers over , for example Forums it might bring up a pop up explaining in very few words what it is.  

Then when you click on Forums, this should take you to forums but it does not do that at present (well it does but only if you scoll down past Clubs.)  (incidentally, you should also be able to set which forums you want to have visible to you..) is it worthwhile to discuss this in more detail.  

Hi Mark,

biggest limitation we have with connect. Is being a platform off the shelf as such, my options for heavy customisation are limited. Things like LI Campus, MyLI, i built from the ground up so we have quite a bit of control. Forums have a lot of moving parts so it made no sense to build one, so we licence this, although we do host it ourself to give us a bit more control.

One of the first things i built for connect was the MyLI login which was a baptism of fire for how to build new plugins for connect. To Address many of the issues you'd be looking at multiple plugins and a custom theme. We have control over what is displayed on the green menu "Unread, Forums, Clubs, Online Users" etc but beyond that we don't have a lot of control without much more indepth dev work. Something i think we can justify if and when connect starts getting a lot of traffic and users.

However i will ask @Antonella Adamus to keep as a suggestion for things we can look into as the site grows.

[Antonella Adamus]

Happy to do that, and review as the usage of the platform develops.

[Louis Varley]

On 9/3/2021 at 9:59 PM, Marc van Grieken said:

I am afraid that since your  @Antonella Adamus very helpful training session (CPD ??) more questions came into focus. @ Louis Varley. The interface is all but intuitive and the menu items are in my opinion not in the right place or of equal weighting.

For example it would be normal on a site like this to have a 'settings' menu and under that would sit a sub menu: in this case 'notification options- 'mode' (light/dark) customiser etc are all settings 

May I suggest that the opening page should lead one intuitively to the bit you want to be:

 

Personally i would 

Simplify the photo or leave this out all together.  

Move LI logo to top Right Moving a logo or anything you want to anchor to the right hand side is not good practice. You never know how wide someones screen will be but you can be sure

the top left will always be visible when the user loads the page. Mobile views may choose to replace with a "hamburger" menu instead however

top Left  say: welcome to connect and then a listing  (not necessarily this list ) This would require a custom theme to deliver these sort of layouts, not quite sure what you mean by whos who here?

• Forum
• Club
• Topic
• Who's who
• settings
• tutorial

Then, as one hovers over , for example Forums it might bring up a pop up explaining in very few words what it is.  Having a "tooltip" on hover over many areas of the site would require a lot of development work, as you would also need settings to turn off this feature.

Then when you click on Forums, this should take you to forums but it does not do that at present (well it does but only if you scoll down past Clubs.)  (incidentally, you should also be able to set which forums you want to have visible to you..) is it worthwhile to discuss this in more detail.  Yes at the moment clicking forums essentially just takes you to "home", if you are in lots of clubs they will be listed first and maybe clog up the page a little, we decided they best sit here to make it easier for people to find their clubs but this could change in time, as people know where to find clubs under the main menu.

@Marc van Grieken i don't know if this helps, but here is a list of a few larger websites using Invision Community Boards. It may give you an idea of how they handle their layouts

https://community.ultimaker.com/

https://linustechtips.com/

https://forums.support.roxio.com/

https://forums.hak5.org/

I've also added a few comments to your suggestions above

The theme we use here is a slightly modified version of https://www.ipsfocus.com/. Basic CSS modification has been done to hide some areas but any larger scale changes would mean we could not update the theme as new patches, security releases of invision are released, leaving us open for security issues. If we wanted to hire someone to design a completly custom theme, we would need a long term contract to ensure the theme is update whenever invision change their base applications so it continued to function, and security issues were patched.

[Lewis White]

Hi,

Further to Mark's comment, I would like to make a further point about navigation. 

If Connect is to be a useful tool, it needs to have an index now.   The trouble with the LI Blogs is that, at present, it is an amorphous mass of miscellaneous entries.

There is no structure , no classification into topics.  

It really needs a clear structure, of Topic Headings, into which every new topic can fits.

eg Landscape design.    Landscape planning.  Landscape science.  Landscape management. Ecology.  Policy.   Landscape engineering.  Landscape technical. Landscape products.  Landscape international .Landscape practice.   Insurance      Contracts     Architecture.     History.   Art. 

Excuse me, I am not a blogger but am very clear as to the need for simple, understandable and logical communication.  If members are to engage properly, in depth on topics of interest,  we need those topics clearly laid out in a logical fashion. Acessibility and time saving are key !