Forum Redesign Announcement

A question about : Forum Redesign Announcement

The MoneySavingExpert.com Forum Redesign

Hi Folks,

I am extremely excited to let you know after much discussion that work has begun on a brand new look and style for the MSE Forum due to be launched later this year.

What specifically will be done?
In technical jargon we're redesigning our forum verticals - namely the main forum page, boards, threads, posts and user control panel.

We're looking at making our archaic registration process easier, quicker and more efficient.

Our overall remit is a cleaner, lighter, tighter look that removes a lot of the clutter and makes the content king.
We're finally looking at mobile viewing for the forum, a long term request and something I'm sorry we haven't been able to deliver before. This might arrive a bit later than the main forum work outlined above, but our team is tasked with considering all platforms during this process.

Why the change?
The forum was last updated in Feb 2012 (majorly in 2010) and we learnt a lot of lessons during that process about the way we went about it, some good and some bad. Change can be unsettling, frustrating and occasionally cause resentment that the place you contribute so much to has moved the goalposts without telling you or, consulting you.

A common reaction to past changes has been it works the way it is, why change it?. We completely understand this; it's perfectly reasonable. However, we have long term plans for the forum to allow it to compete at the highest level as a social media site to help people save money (it was the 8th biggest UK social network in 2011 according to hitwise, but we are competing against more and more of them in 2013), without losing the fantastic community spirit, ethos and organic growth of the last decade, and that requires us to move with the times.

We want to help people find the information they need (this is always our top priority) and we want to make the process as easy, friendly and fulfilling as we can. You, our forum users provide a huge amount of great content, and our editorial team provides a huge amount of great independent research - we want to ensure people can find both helping them make better informed financial decisions based on their own circumstances.

We'll talk to you about what we're thinking of doing
One of the biggest mistakes I believe we made last time was not involving our forum users enough during the process. One thing I've ensured our team works into the plans is milestone points where we can show you ideas and concepts and ask for feedback. This might be via the occasional poll, an open discussion or a focused feedback session on a particular aspect depending on what the team is looking at. We also intend to run offline focus groups of non forum users to get a balanced view.

It's important to say though that we do have our own objectives and a team of experienced professionals who understand our industry, our competitors and other cutting edge communities so there may be times we listen but make a decision for other reasons. We will listen though.

If you choose, you can stay on the current version (though we hope you don't!)
So how about we don't force you over? Our intention is to give this new look to new forum users and all non-logged in site users. Current users will not be forced across when it's launched. We will provide clear links so you can try the new forum on for size and we truly hope we'll have done the right work to make you want to stay. Don't like it though? Just hop back to the old version - we'll still be friends

Please be patient with us, even if you think we're wrong!
All we ask is when you feedback to us you are courteous, constructive and remember there are real people working hard here who genuinely are trying to make things better. You can tell us what isn't working for you, and why that doesn't work. No problem.

However, if you simply come onto the thread to moan, disrupt, be rude to other forum members and staff and provide no value to the discussion other than you're all a bunch of talentless idiots who are ruining the forum for us forever, we reserve the right to prevent you discussing on it as we simply won't win you over, and we'd rather hear from people who have something salient to say that can help us shape the forum's future.

These are MoneySavingExpert.com plans
We've reached this stage after lots of internal discussion, with the aims stated above. In case anyone is worried, Moneysupermarket.com has not had any influence on the decision or content of the redesign. We are bound by our Editorial Code and, as always, are our own company with our own aims - and that's to help people save money in the best way we can. Martin's wanted these changes for some time. Until now we simply didn't have the resource and manpower to do it. Now we do. The time has come for the MSE Forum to step forward and move on and we hope its clear making it better for our site users is our main goal.

Finally...
Hopefully we've at least covered the most common questions, and I'm happy to try and answer any further questions for a while - just be aware I don't have all the answers yet as we're just starting this process. We've tried to be as honest as possible and I hope it really comes across that myself and my team genuinely feel we're working toward a better MSE Forum for the people who make it work - our users (that'd be you).

The server migration this week is the first step on the road to giving you a better overall MoneySavingExpert.com and Forum

Thanks,
Darren

Update 25 July

We're looking for your thoughts on what you'd most like to see and not see on the redesigned forum.

Please come over to the Marry, snog, throw off a cliff? thread to let us know.

Best answers:

• you write beautifully
  other than that thanks, speaking for myself i like change, i like looking at designs
• I like big boards and I cannot lie!
  It is getting a bit bloated now though, hope it all goes well
• A good start. You do indeed seem to have learned from the last time. I'm still on the settings before that and it's very unlikely that I would want to change from them. The current design had little effect other than to waste scree n real estate on my nice 2600x1600 monitor and delivered no great benefits for me other than slower workflow for my core activities: reading and replying to posts. Though if you associate things like a spam button with those changes that is nice but not remotely close to being worth the costs it would have imposed to get it if it was only available in the current default view.
  A few gotchas that can be very painful:
  1. Display layouts based on some presumed display resolution instead of auto-sizing. Particularly important for message bodies not to be fixed. I'm pretty sure that you will not be able to know in advance which screen size, resolution or aspect ratio my native monitor or virtual machine is going to have, let alone what will happen when I resize one or span a display over more than one monitor.
  2. Excessive focus on programmed interactions between users instead of the core reading and writing task. It's a particularly high risk if "social" things like friending are the underlying design objective because they could end up receiving excessive prominence compared to the core things done in a forum.
  3. Animation. If any screen element is animated the first thing I will do is work to find some way to stop the animation. If I can't it's unlikely that I would use whatever page has the unavoidable animation. The annoyance factor is so high that it completely destroys any utility the page has, except for very occasional use, where I'll put another window over the top of the animating part. I don't make any significant use of any web pages that have unavoidable animation.
  One initial step might be to describe the priorities of the forum and where the desired changes fit within those priorities. For example, from the contributor user side the top objective might be efficient reading and writing of messages between humans who are not employees. Start by getting the priority order wrong and the rest can easily end up troubled.
  But lets start with a basic question: what do you think my workflow looks like? I come here and I do what, in what order and why do I use that order, having determined that it is the most efficient one for me?
  Now, what does the workflow of others look like and what are the relative frequencies and values of those workflows?
  Then what will the effect of the changes be on those workflows? How many more or less clicks? How much more or less scrolling to read and write?
  You have started particularly well with "Don't like it though? Just hop back to the old version - we'll still be friends". The risk isn't really loss of friendship but making things sufficiently cumbersome or just awkward that it ceases to be an attractive place to read and write. Or just becomes less attractive than the alternatives that might end up with a more productive interface.
  You did succeed with the previous old version: I didn't end up using my control of the client to do any substantial page rewriting.
  You can help to increase the chances of adoption by using things like clearly described tags and such so that it's relatively easy for those with specific needs to use things like !important directives or filters to override any pieces that are troubling for them.
• Will new emoticons be included (pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease)?
• And the missing acute accented letters?
• @jamesd Thanks James, a very comprehensive reply. Our main focus here is the effect the forum has when people arrive at the site for the first time. If you look at, say, our landing page (main forum board list), there sheer amount of things going on there can be overwhelming for someone who just wants to ask a question about PPI. Do we really need a group of orange men on every page? Is it obvious how you join the forum? Maybe/maybe not.
  These are the type of questions we're asking and the metrics we have are that we could do this better. It's not bad by any means, but every user who bounces is a lost money saver we could help.
  Likewise, if we can make the experience better for our long term users, we've hit utopia. However the reason we're not intending to force is that some things we may do specifically for new users and visitors may not be liked by long term users, and we want to ensure both target groups are engaged. My aim, clearly, is to present a new design for all users that (even if they don't all agree with everything) they believe is overall a better experience.
  I'll let some of your other points sink in for the time being if that's ok but I appreciate your contribution
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  @Old Wrinkly one of our biggest new user drop out points is registration. They either can't find it, find it too heavy going or are so maddened by the captcha system that they give up. We've got some fairly strong data in this area so it seems logical that we can make that better. It's probably one of the things we get emailed about the most.
  Social Media : We're not trying to be Facebook as such. However a lot of social media sites do certain things in certain ways because they work. It's important that my team always remember we are a Forum first and foremost, but this is a huge, fantastic community of people and people chat, interact and conduct part of their lives on here. It's a fine balance but one I feel we can all benefit from.
  Clutter : I suspect most of you never notice the top, right hand side or various other elements on the page. I probably don't myself and yet it all pushes content down the page and at thread level is can be distracting. At this point we don't know specifically what we might change, but those are the type of things. Likewise, are heavy green bars and multiple boxes everywhere the best approach? Maybe/maybe not - but my inkling is that a lot of the forum look ultimately hides content unnecessarily.
  Salient : The post you've just made was constructive and useful. If replies are that, and not abusive, offensive or designed to wind up other users, staff then I very much value your contribution. We're trying to do something positive for users and MSE; sniping, being abusive or disruptive is draining, demoralising and unnecessary for other users and MSE staff.
  Acute accented letters : Sorry just remind me what this is - I've spent quite a long time building this redesign project up, this has slipped under my radar.
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  @marialionza it's not at the top of my list of priorities, but I'll certainly keep a note and if we can, we will.
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  @meher firstly, thanks for your kind words in the first reply. I like widgets and graphical displays too. Will they be used and are they practical for us? No idea right now - but your comment is noted.
  Mobile : To my knowledge, Martin is yet to fund his own ereader, tablet or phone. Knowing Martin he's probably already mentally done the blueprint on all of them though What name did you have in mind?
  As I say, I don't have all the specifics at the moment, because we're just starting out on this road but I hope this is helping show our vision for progress.
  [Sorry the quote function is having on off day on my machine - i'll add that to the redesign list ]
• Will the Competitions board be getting the ability to only view competitions you've "crossed" or only competitions you've "ticked"? (and maybe even the option to only view ones you haven't crossed or ticked!)
  It's something many compers really would like to see implemented.
• So relieved to hear this is not moving to moneysupermarket via the backdoor . All I ask is can we keep our stars\status's as they are? Will skip over to new look MSE if that is the case.