The Artistic Outlaw

The modern message board has a certain look and feel, it’s a specific look, it’s been in use a long time, it’s comfortable and it’s friendly, nay familiar. The modern message board GUI is for lack of a better phrase; inundated to a point of almost no return. Software developers are afraid to stray too far for fear of user rebellion, message board administrators feel the same, afraid their user group will turn their collective backs on the community or software due to sweeping changes and tweaks. Unfortunately, this makes little sense and if it weren’t for a very vocal minority it would be a ridiculous notion of stagnancy and inability to develop something better, making daily and first time use easier and more intuitive. In this series, I intend to propose a better way; I’ll focus on one standard forum view per article, and try to back up my ideas, and ideals with solid arguments, in some cases I may fail miserably. Won’t you join me?

I’ve worked with message board software, as a hobby and professionally for five years, I’ve designed and launched over two-hundred and fifty message board skins; custom, experimental and pre-made. I’ve had the unique opportunity to experience forum software from several points of view and feel that I’ve amassed a hefty bag full of expertise in the design and GUI architecture of message board software. What I want to discuss in this premiere article is the standard forum index and how it can be improved on several levels.

Let’s start at the top, the brand, the header. What purpose does the logo and graphic brand serve? Other than advertisement, and an inaccessible link back to the forum index, I see no use or purpose for the branded header. Let’s strip it out. Now what should we put at the top then, I think, the most logical and user friendly choice is the welcome/login/register message.

Here’s my thought; Most people read from left to right, the first thing you do when you go to a forum is look at the top left corner and scan across—unless of course you’re a regular user and have been there so many times you have the forum software memorized—but we’re attempting to increase usability and help first time users to be less intimidated and more interested in returning.

In the top left corner, “Welcome, James Mathias ( log-out )” below that quick links to important stuff; “My Preferences” (user control panel) and “View New Posts” (only shows if there are new posts).

What about the top right, let’s not waste any usable space; I put a search field for quick and dirty keyword searches, below that I placed links for “Admin CP” (only shows for administrators), “Forum Index” (a way back home) and “Help/F.A.Q.” (link to built-in software F.A.Q.).

That’s it, the whole header. We’ve eliminated the software brand as unnecessary, we’ve moved the welcome and personal links up and to the left, and placed an accessible and quick search option in the top right. Not only are we off to a good start to making the forum, slimmer and more friendly but also more intuitive and easier to use, and we’ve barely begun. Already we have saved several hundred pixels of vertical screen space, without loss or compromise to functionality or features.

I’ve created a design mockup of what the forum index should look like and I will be linking to sectional screenshots throughout this article in order to better illustrate what I am talking about, the first screenshot is of the forum index top.

What’s next? Well In my opinion the next thing I want to see after the welcome message is the content. On the forum index what’s the content? The categories and forums, or in some cases a topic list depending on the feature set of the software. I personally like categories, and forums, they are not always needed, but they are a solid feature with very few drawbacks.

I assumed the software has categories and forums available—as most modern forum software does—when deciding how to display the categories and forums and what other information to display, some people like to have a ton of information available, and others prefer less. Our goal is to make the forum index better, more useful and less cluttered; we’re going to remove a great deal of what a standard forum might display on the index, in favor of creating a more useful display and something that will be less intimidating to the daily and first time user.

Since the forum index is just a listing of the available categories and forums within those categories, we’re going to concentrate on that information, without cluttering the display with useless items that can be displayed more logically in other areas.

We have to decide what it is we’re displaying. Many argue that a forum index is tabular data, well in some cases I can understand that, but a forum index listing is not really tabular data, in fact aside from listing the number of topics and replies, it really doesn’t fit the definition of tabular data at all. On the other hand it’s not really a list of items in the strictest since either, nor is it a definition list, semantically it’s a division of data, we have in most common cases, a forum name (header), a forum description (paragraph or sentence), a moderator (sentence), the number of topics and replies (numerical data), who and where the last post was made (paragraph), and varying other items of raw data, most of which is useless, and redundant.

As you can see for each forum we have a header, two to three paragraphs and two numbers. This is not a list and it’s not a table. I believe a category name should be displayed as a header (h2), and then each forum should be displayed as a division with a secondary header (h3) and paragraphs as necessary. In this situation marking up as a table or list or definition list is incorrect and won’t look the way it should when styles are off.

Which information should we strip out? I like the idea of getting rid of the number of replies, it’s useless and only confuses. We keep the number of topics because it is nice to know how many topics a forum has inside. As for the rest we’ll strip everything aside from, Forum name and description, last post made and any sub forum links.

What about the forum marker graphic? Huh Jim? I think they’re unnecessary and they add–in some cases–a great deal of bulk to the forum index. I would make the entire forum division change color to indicate new posts; in addition I would add a small “NEW!” in text, styled with CSS. Here’s a screenshot of the forum listing.

Lastly, the forum stats/online users/calendar information section, in my opinion this is the most ridiculous section of modern forum software. It’s only shown on the forum index, and it’s the biggest waste of screen space.

Commonly it has a few lines of text left justified with titles and sub titles, and basically it just tells us who’s online right this minute and how many posts and members the forum has, plus varying degrees of redundant and useless information. My idea for this section is to strip it to bare bones. All we really need to know is who’s online, nothing else is is really necessary but for statistic junkies we’ll leave in a single line of text declaring total posts and members. The best place for this line is below the forum list and above the who’s online box. We will put it on the right hand side across from the “mark as read”, “delete cookies” and “subscribe to RSS” links, which are useful.

We’ll display the who’s online box with a header, and a below that a “break-it-down” sentence of who’s on for which user type, and then a comma delimited list of members, whose names are clickable to the user’s profile. At the bottom of that box we put in the links for more detailed who’s online listings “Who’s Online Listing”, “Last Click” and the full member listing.

We’ll end with the software copyright, and that’s wraps up the forum index, with no redundancy, an improved flow and a sturdy base to build on. Screenshot of complete forum index.

In closing, the above are my opinions, and the way I feel to best represent and display a forum index page. I don’t mind fielding more in depth questions about my ideas, or even debating certain aspects. You will notice that some common forum index features were omitted, this was purposeful and I have my reasons for each omission, some of which will be explained in later articles of this series, some only mentioned if I’m asked directly about them.

I hope this article was interesting and entertaining, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Next Week, Part Two: Topic Listing.